routine | urbantick

Book – Improvisation and Urban Practice – ReplayCity

By: admin_urbantick

15-06-2011

Space in the city is subject to transformation on different time scales. It is being built and rebuilt constantly and not only by diggers and cranes, but also though the decisions and makings of individuals programming the space.

Theories and practice on this have been neglected for some time and it has been deemed old fashioned to pick up on them. However, more and more the discussion around the production of space and the making capacity of individuals also regarding the conception of space, has gained momentum. A number of aspects probably have lead to this, including the availability of new technologies which requires more dynamic and more subjective conceptions of space.

Image taken from SLCL.CA / Cedric Price ‘Fun Palace’ diagram. “Automation is coming. More and more, machines do our work for us. There is going to be yet more time left over, yet more human energy unconsumed. The problem which faces us is far more than that of the ‘increased leisure’ to which our politicians and educators so innocently refer. This is to underestimate the future. The fact is that as machines take over more of the drudgery, work and leisure are increasingly irrelevant concepts. The distinction between them breaks down. We need, and we have a right, to enjoy the totality of our lives. We must start discovering now how to do so.” – Cedric Price (From Agit-prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price).

In his new book ‘ReplayCity – Improvisation als urbane Praxis’ Christopher Dell brings together an refreshed view on these practices and conceptions. The book is published by Jovis and is only available in German at the moment. The book is organised in three parts, the first one on the city and urban practice, the second on e on improvisation and space and the third part on music and space.

Dell is arguing that the cities have become more complex also because of size and number of people living together, but also has identified a shift in the questioning of the city. He points out that the question no longer is ‘What is the meaning of city?’ but now would be ‘ What produces the city?’

One of the topics for example that is discussed in the book as part of the improvisation and everyday negotiations in space is the aspect of the politics of space.Here it is the discussion around the use of order as structure, form and function of space as defined by individuals, groups or organisation. This does to some extend tie in with Hagerstrands three basic conceptions of space and time where he focuses on restrictions and constraints. This is a much more negative definition Hagerstrand proposes and its great to have it reformulated here by Dell.

The book sources the great thinkers of the past ranging from Kant, to Lefebvre, to the Situationists with Guy Debord and de Certeau. It however also features Peter And Alison Smithson with CIAM or Cedric Price and other great names of the architecture scene of the mid twenties century, very much related for examples to the publication ‘Radical Games‘.

Image taken from metronature / John Cage’s A Dip in the Lake is the exploration of a city by means of a ‘random’ soundmap that leads performers, listeners, or participants to places they may never have been before. The score identifies up of 427 locations within a city. The ‘locations’ are either very specific (such as the intersection of two streets), or more general (such as ‘a park’ or ‘Lake Ontario’). Recordings are made at each of these locations, and divided into 10 groups of 2 (quicksteps), 61 groups of 3 (waltzes) and 56 groups of 4 (marches). These groups of recordings are then mixed live by the performers.

The discussion is cleverly organised and the improvisation terms as well as practice is used to discuss the wider questions of space and city ranging all the way to the design of cities. The book puts forward a very clear theoretical base and argues without loosing sight of the goal consequently along the activities and actions of citizens as the driving element of spacial production. Dell manages to bring the reader to think about the city as a dynamic pice that is constantly shaped and reshaped. This is not a new idea at all, but it has not been presented in such a consequent and updated form for the past thirty years. Dell would not put it this way but essentially what he talks about is the congruence of form and activity as Carl Stinitz put it in the Hypothesis to his article in 1968 ‘Meaning and the congruence of urban form and activity‘: “There is a high overall level of congruence between form and activity. Congruence is defined as consistency between the physical form characteristics of an environment and the attributes of its activities”. And this is definitely an upcoming topic that will, as a concept, be extremely useful especially in connection with the available technology of distributed mobile computing and sensing.

Image taken from pro-qm.de / ReplayCity book cover.

Dell, C., 2011. Replaycity: Improvisation als urbane Praxis, Berlin: Jovis Verlag.

Royal Wedding – London is Dressing up

By: admin_urbantick

27-04-2011

Uncategorised

London is almost ready for the Royal Wedding later this week on the 29th of April. Preparations have been going on for weeks and the media is completely ull with details and stories covering the latest developments. Prince William is getting married to his long term partner Kate Middleton in a ceremony at Westminster Abbey. The event is expected to be the biggest of its kind ever and attract a world wide audience of some 2 billion viewers on TV, radio and internet. Copmared the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana aracted a world wide audience of 750 million and the last Superbowl in America set the national audience record at 111 million viewers.

Image taken from the hotmeganews / The flags along Regent Street in London transforming the space and time warping it back to the beginning of the last century.

Of course digital media is part of this these days and the official web page is central to this. However, the twitter feed will come from @clarencehouse. The general twitter tag for the occasion is #rw2011 or the #royalwedding. The official facebook page with 360’000 likes is also covering the events in detail.

Image taken from the the Sun / The plan of the route between Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey as chosen. Guests and the wedding couple will be traveling along it. Prince William and Kate Middleton will be traveling in the golden carriage if the weather is nice otherwise in a car.

The dressing up of the city as the venue is of course most obvious with the decoration that has been put of in the lead up to the Royal Wedding. Most notably are the coverage of British flags as shown above in Regent Street. It transforms the place completely and give a very different feeling from the usual Christmas decoration. The flag as such still has this official and important touch to it. It almost turns back the time to represent London one hundred or at least fifty years ago with a bit of steam and fog.

Then there is the change in security. It already is a big topic in London anyway but now police have stepped up and security has been tightened. The main focus is on the route between Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey of course, but also other major areas and attractions are being prepared.

Image taken from the toledoblade / Security is being checked and implemented across London.

There is a lot of money involved an additional guest in London and the UK in general are expected to help boost the economy.
The goverment is also very much involved with a lot of hopes to gain some benefit from the event directly. A number of oficial goverment web page feature the wedding as their current top priority. For example HNE on how to stay save during the Royal Wedding of course or DirectGov with the public service view on it.

With the day being declared an additional day off there is more time for employees to spend money. Merchandising is expected to make huge amounts by selling all the flags and cups and plates. The BBC says: “Restaurateurs and hoteliers can now look forwards to a two year bulge in tourism numbers, with the 2011 wedding to be followed by the 2012 Olympics.” The UK Gift Company, which specialises in Royal items anticipates an upturn in business of about 30% to 40%.

Image taken from the BBC / Seating plan for the guest at Westminster Abbey. The structuring of the seating in groups is following clear ordering principles.

The seating is following a detailed ordering system of who is sitting where and next to whom. The arrangements have taken weeks of negotiation and preparations. 1900 guest will be seated. For everyone else there is an app for that, to take you round Westminster Abbey in 3D with a lot of background information. However, it will cost you a few bucks.

Image taken from the BBC / Layout of the cutlery on the table for Prince William and Kate’s wedding reception.

Of course the planning of details goes further into details with small gestures and practices. From a city scale right down to how to dress for the wedding, how to greet and of course how to eat. The Royal Wedding has its very own layout of cutlery on the wedding reception table. The BBC has the details on how to manage all the different pieces. However, the BBC comments: “It’s quite simple – start at the outside and work in as the meal progresses”

The guest list has only been released, but very much in the nature of the time has shortly after ben declared public data and the Guardian data blog features it, with the option to download the list as free data. Maybe you get a great viz out of it!

Visualisation using many eyes by IBM / Bubble chart using the open data of the Wedding invitation list, coloured by nationality. Click to interact.

The organisation of the wedding reflects the strong hierarchical organisation of the Royal concept. Both practically and socially, it is a clear structure of ranks with the Queen at the top end and this will be reinforced through practice on the day. Practice is feeding into al elements of the wedding, from invitation to seating, even to traveling, there is a very strict guide on who is leaving when for Westminster Abbey. Of course the most practical way is the addressing of people respecting the individual rank. The five levels after the Royals are: the Duke / Duchess, followed by the Marquess / Marchioness, followed by the Earl / Count or Countess, followed by Viscount / Viscountess, followed by Baron / Baroness, as described by Debretts.

There is a lot more to the Royal Wedding than just a couple getting married. It is not about the two individuals Prince William and Kate Middleton, but about the bigger idea of Royal and State. The event is a far reaching demonstration of a very old aristocratic practice and represents the position of England in general as part of the world.

This demonstration solely is based on practice, routines and established rites and in this case culminate in the wedding ceremony. This is the reason for the practice to be of such importance because only through its celebration it can be established and such an occasion is the perfect practice this structure can celebrate. The bigger idea is the hope that this wedding will put everything in to place.

This of course centres on the Royal family but reaches out from the palace to the wider London area, to national politics, to the society of this country and its related nations, to international politics and ultimately to the world. With this there are a lot of people and groups very keen on getting some positive benefit directly from this ceremony foremost probably the Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative Party as they are trying to deliver massive financial cuts and keep the people quite, but definitely other such as Boris Johnson for London and the upcoming Olympics 2012 and then of course the rehearsal of hierarchical structures will act as a boost to older traditions and society structures probably feeding into the Big Society idea the conservatives are trying to sell. It of course a big celebration of everything that has rank and name, but it pulls in the normal person too. Formost with the announcement of the Royal Wedding day to be a national bank holiday, an extra day off. With this you’ll be buying a lot of good will. Of course then you also have the representatives and identification figurs featuring at the Royal Wedding, such as the Victoria and David Beckham, Joss Stone, Rowan Atkinson, Guy Ritchie or of course Sir Elton John.

These practices are employing symbols and simple seemingly elements such as flags all the way down Regent Street, but exactly this is what lets people create their identity and reinforces a practice of space and lets the Wedding become a great event.

Tokyo Flows – Rest and Rush

By: admin_urbantick

21-03-2011

Uncategorised

Flows of people and cars, full streets and walkways, platforms and crossings represent a dynamic urban metropolis in flux. Tokyo the 24 hour city is the ultimate density symbol and reference for flow representation.

Through out the clip the individuals find shelter, escape the rush and break out, rest and jump back in. Opportunities are multiple. There is a group of friends chatting in between a large body of pedestrians staying as the mass shifts by. Or the individuals that find shelter from the flow in the shadow of some pillars dividing the mass of people streaming by.

Interesting how architecture suddenly plays a different role in this context of temporal representation in the form of a timeLapse. Corners, bends or obstacles turn into havens for a timeout. All this is beautifully framed by Joe Wiecha. The images are shot before the earthquake earlier this month and we hope that the metropolis and the whole of Japan soon finds back to its routines. Tokyo time lapse feature also HERE and HERE earlier.

Social Networking on Time

By: admin_urbantick

18-02-2011

Uncategorised

The thing with time is that if your not on it, you might have missed it. The opportunity windows are small and meeting with others’ shedule might be tricky. This is the same in the ever so present online networking world. Nothing is more boring than a static profile page as you might have on linkedIn or Academia. However, this is one of the option for not to get missed, just be always there.

In the ephemeral world of twitter, facebook, gowalla or foursquare this is not an option. If your facebook page hasn’t changed in the past day, something is wrong, if you haven’t checked in at any location that day on foursquare you must be very ill and in bed and if you did not send any tweets in the past hour this isn’t gona work.

Image taken from tech cocktail / timely logo.

The flow of tweets however, does not guarantee that if you tweet your tweet is being read. On the contrary things are changing fast and as a tweeter your basically battling on your own against the rest of the tweeter kingdom for a sunny spot on the top of any readers list, but on time. Right at that moment this follower of yours is actually reading the first three tweets on the feed, picks the one you wrote and retweets or replays or clicks, but does something with it.

This is tricky, but time is on our side, or better the human desire to organise around it in cycles. Even here on tweet-eden routine rules the behaviour and there is a certain time of the day your tweets will have the prime spot, most-impact-in-24-hours-moment it would be called.

And of course there is an app for everything – here is TIMELY. It is simple but functional. Write a tweet you want to send out, timely looks through your past 199 re-tweeted tweets checks them agains a 24 hour timeframe and calculates the time of the day your tweets had the most impact in the past. At this very moment in the upcoming 24 hours your tweet will be sent. Ever though of something like that?

There isn’t much more to it, really. And to proof the point, the guys at timely, actually flowtown, provide you a basic statistic with the past tweets send on this platform showing the number of clicks, the number of retweets and the number of readers (potential readers) your tweet has had so far.

With this you can really start to enjoy your day. No more worries about keeping up with the bomb shell tweet, just follow the stream of incoming messages, relaxed you can watch other struggle along with tweeting, everything with the peace of mind that your three tweets scheduled will be on time. Thats all that counts.

Image taken from urbanTick on flickr / Screenshot of my timely performance panel.

Of course timely does offer other functions, for example you can have multiple accounts, or invite other people to schedule tweets on your timeline, this is great for collaboration on one account. It features an integrated url shortener that actually work The settings allow you to controle how many tweets will be sent per 24 hours and accordingly the analysis will be adjusted. Weekends can be different or ignored and you can also force a tweet to go out in the next 30 minutes, of course timed to fit the best time frame.

One thing to mention though is that the management of the queue, you can prewrite a whole list of tweets, is tricky since there is only a delete, edit or move to the top button. A move up and down, especially for the top few in the queue would be very handy.

Anyway try it for yourself and get your tweets out on time. At least some of them, you can still use in parallel other platforms to reply or interact, this is gona be the back bone to keep your twitter account running on time!

Personalised Urban Space

By: admin_urbantick

24-11-2010

Uncategorised

If we start with Petra Kempf’s publication ‘You Are The City‘ we jump straight into the discussion about the personal expression in the urban environment. Clearly this has become dramatically individualised and
and citizens have grown into roles as independent user, aspiring for flexibility and uniqueness.
The technological development in the recent years, month actually, is fuelling these developments. Here individuality turns into solitary and disconnectednes with the latest app telling you whats happening around you. Interaction becoming the biggest thing as long as we don’t need to talk to anyone.

The urban landscape is turning from a servicescape in to a stagescape for individuals to produce themselves as the latest celebrity. Interaction becomes one directional, the famous show off to be looked at, the ultimate aspiration.

The individualisation obviously is a very big topic in the media and some recent project are quite cleverly employing this trend to the point of questioning its real existence.

For example the current aviva campaign puts the individual in to the centre. On the website http://www.youarethebigpicture.com/ they started a collection of portraits, with the option to draw in your facebook image, as a representation of personal commitment and support. The great thing is the personalised video clip everyone gets as a sort of gift. The uploaded image is embedded in the clip and everyone has the chance to appears big in the city.

In fact aviva actually is running live projections of the submitted images in cities around the world. Some have ended, but on the page you have access to the recorded time lapse.

Another effort is made by the Dentsu London media company. They have recently had some really exciting project utilising the latest technologies with quite visionary content. See for example the iPad illumination clip.

THey were also looking into the personalisation of the city environment and visualised their ideas in two animated clip, sort of augmented visualisations. Their claim goes beyond the content, but this doesn’t matter at the moment I guess.

The basic idea is to utilise and augment existing objects and surfaces with personalised content and information. The desire to keep up to date with the latest social networking news, updates, notifications and tweets. Some of the idea are quite interesting, especially the ones that aim at linking the individual back to the physical context. It is very simple, but for example the Dentsu train ticket idea is a different take on the location awareness trend.

There is a lot of potential in this trend to personalise the everyday environment. There might be individual benefit and surprises to be discovered for everyone. However it might be not as new as it would like to be. But it is certainly a new take on the everyday routines and a chance to embed it with the aspired independence and individuality of our current culture. Definitely the city is the playground.

Disruption – Closed Stations and Crowd Messages

By: admin_urbantick

07-09-2010

Uncategorised

In the serie on cycle disruption here is a new one on the latest tube strike in London today. It is the first morning into the tube strike and chaos is rolling into the city. Some earlier posts on the subject in the past can be found HERE (following the disruption), HERE (disruption second take) and HERE (every year). There are only very few tube line actually running a service, Northern Line being one of them. However this might not mean that you can get a train on this line and it aso does not mean you will arrive at the desired destination as many stations along the line are closed.

For the latest updates on the open stations please see the official TFL website.

Image taken from the BBC London Tube Strike Map – September 2010 / a platform for crowd sourced real time travel information.

But even there you might not get the most up to date information. If you put more trust in real time crown sourced information you can go to the BBC test mashup-crownsource-tubestrike-map and click around for infos on our local area.

There are a number of ways you can participate: a) Sending an email to londontravel@bbc.co.uk, b) Sending a text to 81333 starting your message LONDON STRIKE, c) Sending a tweet with the hashtag #tubestrike, d) Uploading an audioboo with the hashtag #tubestrike or directly to the BBC London stream, e) Filling in the form on the site

new TWTR.Widget({
version: 2,
type: ‘search’,
search: ‘#tubestrike’,
interval: 6000,
title: ‘Tube Strike September 2010’,
subject: ‘Live update’,
width: 580,
height: 460,
theme: {
shell: {
background: ‘#8ec1da’,
color: ‘#ffffff’
},
tweets: {
background: ‘#ffffff’,
color: ‘#444444’,
links: ‘#1985b5’
}
},
features: {
scrollbar: false,
loop: true,
live: true,
hashtags: true,
timestamp: true,
avatars: true,
toptweets: true,
behavior: ‘default’
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}).render().start();

The page is set up to log incidents over a longer period of time. The timeline is set for a whole year. There is even a play back feature integrated that wil replay the information logged and can potentially visualised the ebb and flows of the system. Currently there seems only data available from today so no point replaying it, but in a month time this might be very interesting already. The project could grow into a valuable alternative to the official information.

Reports are logged on the site and can be accessed. In this sense everyone has access to the source data and can verify the accuracy of the information. This a note in the light of the recent discussion about the validation of the crowd sourced data at the CRESC conference in Oxford. Making the data available is one way of dealing with this issue. However if the amount of data grow too large, and hopefully it will in the case of crowd sourced real time transport information, it becomes impossible for individuals to crawl through the mountain of snippets and verify individual pieces.

Image taken from the Oliver O’Brien’s cycle hire visualisation / London Cycle Hire Dock Status Map taken on Tuesday 07th September 2010 09h30.

Since there is little progress to be made today on public trasport the London Cycle Hire scheme would be a perfect alternative. A quick look at the viualisation map over at Oiver O’Brien’s page draws a rather pessimistic picture. The scheme has sort of come to a lock down too with all bikes being parked in the centre and empty station in zone two. People who have planned ahead managed to grab one this morning and traveled in by bike. There will be the big run this afternoon to catch one of the central bikes to ride it back out again to avoid the long queues at the crowded bus stop.

On twitter the tube strike is a big topic with alo Steven Fry taking to it linking this 2006 clip on frustrated commuters and the perceived incapability of TFL to meet their needs. This is linked without comment, this discussion is too complicated and personal. I believe, from past experience, the staff working today are doing quite a good job given the extend of the shutdown.

Time of Day – The London Bike Hire Scheme

By: admin_urbantick

14-08-2010

Uncategorised

For only three weeks the London Bike Hire Scheme is in operation and so far it seem to be rather well received. The 6,000 Barclays (sponsor) bikes, which have arrived in London are parked at 315 stations dotted across the centre of the capital. An initial map is available through the TfL website.

It give basic infos such as no available bikes and no of available parking spaces. The scheme is based on the concept that people can hire a bike at one station, ride it through the city and park it at another. This means the bikes are in a constant rotation around the city. In this sense both these infors, no of bikes and no of parking spaces, are essential for the functioning and comfort of usage.

As a data source this has obviously inspired data and mapping enthusiasts from different London universities to, on one hand improve on the visualisation and on the other to start analysing the data.
One of the mashup maps is developed by Oliver O’Brien from CASA. The visualisation was already covered by the Londonist, the Telegraph and other blogs such as spatialanalysis.

Image taken from suprageography / Mashup map showing the status of each London Bike Scheme docking station. Yellow border line indicates a station as full, clicking on a dot reviles the bottom left usage graph over the past couple of hours.

It shows the parking locations as dots indicating with a red-blue colour scheme the status of the docking station. In real time one can follow how hundreds of bikes migrate through the city. This is obviously tightly linked to the routines of the bike users and as O’Brien note on the blog seems to be mainly determined by the working pattern. This suggests that a lot of working people in the city are actually switching and using the scheme already for everyday use.

In a graph based visualisation Aidan Slingsby form City University in London is working with the same data, focusing on the trend of usage per station. Each graph compares the current to the previous day.

Image taken from gicentre / Graph visualisation showing the status of each London Bike Scheme docking station. The list is ordered by distance from, as input in the right column.

In a timeLapse copmiled from screenshots O’Brien and Chechire show the dinamics in a 24 hour day of the London Bike Hire Scheme. Quite nice how the dots change the colour over time and viualise the daily migration.

Found via SPATIAL ANALYSIS.

Ashes, Roses and the Routine we Take for Granted

By: admin_urbantick

20-04-2010

Uncategorised

It is difficult to get fresh, organic, Kenyan roses these days in London. Beside the roses a number of other goods are getting rare or have already vanished from the shelfs in UK and other north European shops. It is not that customers would buy more of those goods, but it is impossible to import due to the closure of air traffic in large parts of Europe due to the vulcano Eyjafjallajokull spitting a massive cloud of ashes into the sky. Air traffic closure in northern Europe is now in its fifth day and symptoms are spreading beyond the airline industry. Affecting everyday life situation are most likely to be observed on the shelves of your supermarket. Special goods, such as freshly cut flowers as well as fruit and vegetable are among the first products to go missing, eg sell out. The UK currently imports about 40% of their goods. The bulk arrives by boat, but specific ones are brought in by air fright. Today across the EU official are positive to be able to terminate the complete air lockdown in the early morning. However latest headlines on the BBC (21:26 GMT, Monday, 19 April 2010 22:26 UK) quote the MET to observe new clouds drifting from Island towards the UK and mainland Europe.

Ash Cloud Animation for the UK Met Office: This shows the ash dispersion up to 20,000 feet across Europe from the Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre. Advisories are issued every 6 hours.

Andy Hooper, a geologist who did his postdoctoral research at the University of Iceland’s Institute of Earth Sciences, pointed out in a blog post for Reuters on Monday that “it remains a very real possibility that the volcano will continue to erupt on-and-off for months to come, as occurred during the last eruptive period” at Eyjafjallajokull in 1821-23. Mr. Hooper added, “Like 1821-1823, this current eruption is likely to remain small in terms of volume, but in an age of mass aviation, a relatively small amount of erupted ash is having huge consequences.”
This event with complete flight ban compares only to the post 9/11 events and is now said to have cost the airline industry already more in terms of losses. The news report a £130 million loss per day for the industry.
I guess very few people have actually thought that something like this would ever happen. It caught everyone by surprise and in time for the UK school term start, after the Easter Brake, a number of teachers and pupils will be missing from the classroom. One million Britons are said to be abroad by Sunday 18 April. The latest development and the some history in maps back to the 21 of March can be found HERE. Latest news on real time flights and open or closed airports can be found on FlightRadar24.

An animation from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, showing the projected dispersion of volcanic ash from the eruption in Iceland. Blogger Jonathan Crowe explains that the ash cloud is represented by areas colored black; areas colored yellow show where ash has fallen to earth by itself; areas colored red show where ash has fallen as a result of precipitation. The color scheme may owe something to that of Norway’s most famous volcano-inspired painting, “The Scream.”

The optimisation in food delivery and storage in the concepts of large retailers now leaves them with difficulties to fill the shelves. It is not a massive cries for that people had to go panic raid the stores, but it is visible on a shopping trip to your local store. The Guardian writes “The UK imports about 90% of its fruit and 60% of its vegetables. While the vast majority come by sea – Fair Trade bananas from the West Indies, for instance, are regularly delivered to Southampton and Portsmouth – some of the more exotic inhabitants of the UK’s shops come by air.”
The Telegraph reports “The ban on air freight has meant that fruits such as figs, papaya and coconuts, fresh flowers and pharmaceutical products – all of which are delivered by air – are not reaching their destinations in the UK. Air freight accounts for 25pc of the UK’s international goods movements by value.” and that was on day two of the events.
The tight interlink between city activities and the provision of food tell its own urban tale. Not that we are relying on Kenyan roses, but even essential goods have to be delivered into the urban areas from storage or directly from its production place. This logistical puzzle is increasingly optimised and trimmed to run on a short term basis. No longer the supermarkets sit on hugh stock pies. Space for storage is a expensive and they all want to be flexible and not sit on unwanted products. The result is an increasingly real-time provision of goods. This is is obviously no difference to the consumers if everything goes according to plan. However in extraordinary circumstances this can rather quickly leave large urban areas without the essentials. Now it is the fact ta airplanes can’t fly earlier last year officials feared that the pig flue could leave the delivery chains understaffed and also leave supermarket shelves empty.

Image taken from frozenJuice

How Predictable is our Movement?

By: admin_urbantick

24-02-2010

Uncategorised

Physicist Albert-László Barabási, well known for his work on network theory, has tuned his attention in a recent paper to the human movement. In the latest issue of Science 19 February 2010
Vol 327, Issue 5968, his paper ‘Limits of Predictability in Human Mobility‘ reports the research work undertaken with 50’000 anonymized mobile phone user data.
Barabási has don a lot of work on networks as early as 1999 were he coined the term Scale Free Networks, describing a type of networks with major hubs, such as for example the world wide web. In his barabasilab at Northeastern University, Centre for Complex Network Research a number of network related project are researched.

Image taken from The University of Chicago / Diagram of a scale-free network that contains components with a highly diverse level of connectivity. Some components form highly interconnected hubs, while other components have few connections, and there are many levels of interconnectivity in between.

However in this recent work the focus is on the predictability of human movement. The authors say: “By measuring the entropy of each individual’s trajectory, we find a 93% potential predictability in user mobility across the whole base. Despite the significant differences in the travel patterns, we find a remarkable lack of variability.” The work was intended to close a gap in the approaches to modeling human behavior. Despite personally we rarely perceive our actions as random, the existing models are largely based on the factors of random movement. The paper demonstrated that even though the activities, distances and motivations for individual movement might be very divers and different the predictability of an individuals location is not. They all have very similar predictability values, ranging between 80 % and 92 %. AOL News titles their article on the work “Study Makes It Official: People Are So Predictable” implying that this must be soooo boring.

Image taken from AOL News / These diagrams represent the movements of two mobile phone users. The one on the left shows that the person moved between 22 different cell towers during a three-month period, and placed 52 percent of his calls from one area; the other subject hit 76 spots, and was much less rooted.

This might be very surprising news for most people. The fact that there is so much less changing and spontaneity might seem unrealistic, but a similar impression was given by the data collected with the UrbanDiary project last year. Even though this was a really small sample, the fact that individuals travel most of the time along their known routes, between only a few hot spots clearly emerged. This can also be seen visualised in the What Shape are You? renders. Also Hagerstand’s work pointed in to this direction arguing that the ‘Constraints’ are too strong for too many out of rhythm activities.
Barabási already undertook similar work with mobile phone data in 2008, which war published as an article in nature, by Gonzalez MC, Hidalgo CA, Barabasi A-L. with the title ‘Understanding individual human mobility patterns’. In this article they analysed data of 100’000 mobile phones. Was the media coverage back then (two years) very much concerned about privacy issues related to the data source, for example NYTimes is this less of an issue. Nevertheless it is obvious that the researchers try to play it save by mentioning about ten times in the article that they work with anonymized data.
The argument is largely the same in both articles and the finding too. In both papers the researchers show their surprise about the outcome, that the movement can be predicted. However to my surprise they stick to their study and do not draw any strong links to routines and rhythms of personal habits. You can listen to a podcast where Barabási talks about this research.
In the more recent paper they conclude “At a more fundamental level, they also indicate that, despite our deep-rooted desire for change and spontaneity, our daily mobility is, in fact, characterized by a deep-rooted regularity.”
I believe that the former, spontaneity, is very much a cultural phenomenon similar to the urge to stay young. The later, regularity, is the provider of identity and orientation resulting in stability and safety and therefor fundamental to human everyday life. Interesting should be Barabási’s upcomming new book Burst on “The Hidden Patterns Behind Everything We Do”.

Good Morning Monday

By: admin_urbantick

25-01-2010

Uncategorised

There are tons of nice Twitter visualisations out there and I have only been looking at a few over the weekend to get a feel for what people are producing. Different strands of interest, some more towards social network for example neuroproduction’s ‘twitter_friends_network_browser’, who knows who and how, some focus on stats, like the twitterholic and others obviously focusing on the content of the tweets e.g. the ‘TwitterStreamGraphs’ by neoformix. Interesting are also the combination of both. A nice clip by BLPRNT with ‘Good morning’ tweets from all over the world as a god morning to start the week (an earlier similar project by BLPRNT ‘ Just Landed…’ featured HERE). There is little needed to explain the content – bring on the week.

— urbantick

Book – Improvisation and Urban Practice – ReplayCity

Royal Wedding – London is Dressing up

Tokyo Flows – Rest and Rush

Social Networking on Time

Personalised Urban Space

Disruption – Closed Stations and Crowd Messages

Time of Day – The London Bike Hire Scheme

Ashes, Roses and the Routine we Take for Granted

How Predictable is our Movement?

Good Morning Monday

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