Augmenting Cities

Augmenting Cities image via.

Niantic CEO John Hanke opens the event | Photo: Niantic / Knight Foundation

We were excited to take part in an invitational symposium a few weeks ago, Augmenting Cities, that brought together under one roof 150 game designers, artists and urbanists from a number of countries "to reflect on how people, cities, and technology will evolve and be shaped through augmented reality (AR)".

The gathering was convened by groundbreaking AR games company Niantic –– the folks behind Pokémon Go, Ingress and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite –– together with the Knight Foundation, a leading urban philanthropic fund. It was hosted at the Oakland Museum of California, itself part of a city that has recently seen rapid and far-reaching transformation through the Bay Area's latest tech boom.

As the event description notes, "Just as mobile communication and computing has altered the evolution of cities over the last 20 years, AR technology stands to fundamentally change how we connect with each other and experience communities for decades to come." But what might that fundamental change look like?

USC Situation Lab director Jeff Watson (centre) speaks on a panel with (left to right): Ina Fried (Axios; moderator), Gene Becker (Samsung), Ross Finman (Niantic), Ilana Lipsett (IFTF), and Kevin Slavin (The Shed) | Photo: Stuart Candy / Situation Lab

So on the back of two days of presentations and panel discussions by game and experience design luminaries, including Felix Barrett (founder of Punchdrunk), Sarah Brin (Meow Wolf strategic partnerships director), audio artist Duncan Speakman, game designer Katie Salen (UC Irvine), and Niantic founder John Hanke –– as well as our own Jeff Watson (director of USC Situation Lab) and Sitlab collaborator Jen Stein (creative lead at Experimental Design) –– we were asked to devise and run the culminating session, an afternoon's activity for all participants to explore possible futures in this area.

Our mission was to come up with a hands-on, playful, and collaborative intervention that would help develop not only deeper social connections among attendees, but also potentially actionable initiatives in this fast-changing urban AR design space. With around 150 participants and only two hours to get through generating, refining, selecting, and sharing out concepts, it was a worthy challenge.

I led process design and facilitation with a fantastic team made up of Stein, Watson, and CMU Situation Lab associate Ceda Verbakel. We realised that thanks to the venue's particular layout and the number of attendees, players would have to take these co-creative steps at the same time while sited in different locations. This helped to birth, at last, a project that had been gestating for some time; a self-contained facilitation kit.

Participant teams proceed through the Urban Playshop staged by Situation Lab at the Augmenting Cities symposium | Photo: Niantic / Knight Foundation

Photo: Niantic / Knight Foundation

Photo: Niantic / Knight Foundation

In teams of three or four players, future-artifact ideas were incepted using combinatorial prompts from a modified version of our game The Thing From The Future, with ideation rounds timeboxed at 3–5 minutes. This first phase allowed folks to explore in relatively open fashion to start with, and produced a wide variety of imaginative responses. In the second phase, each team selected two of their most promising ideas from the collection that they had generated together, surfacing some of their most thematically relevant concepts and provocations. They then partnered up with another team, to receive feedback and discover which of the two candidate concepts should be developed, in the third and home stretch of the Playshop, into a pitch or advertisement to share live on stage with everyone in the last session of the conference.

We at Situation Lab don't always have the time to write our projects up for sharing more widely, although we have featured at our website some of the gameplay approaches and variations developed over several years, and we continually partner with groups around the world, with a focus on values-aligned initiatives and organisations, to offer customised processes that scaffold rigorous imagination, co-creative exploration, and strategic conversation.

Last year for instance, we ran sessions or whole events in this design space with, to name a few, the Omidyar Group, Pennsylvania's Department of Education, Alaska's Cook Inlet Tribal Council, Mexico City's Laboratorio para la Ciudad, the Association of Professional Futurists, and Institute for the Future (IFTF) with the World Bank Climate Investment Funds. In 02019 so far, Sitlab has collaborated with, among others, the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Stanford d.school, the Obama Foundation, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the brand-new Pittsburgh high school City of Bridges, and (in collaboration with IFTF's Governance Futures Lab) United States Conference of Mayors gatherings in Austin and Honolulu.

This post is prompted by a desire to share a bit more of what we've been doing, and more particularly by the terrific energy generated in this initiative. For more information on Augmenting Cities check out the event webpage, overview (pdf), and recap.

Participants devise and share ideas using a specially adapted version of The Thing From The Future | Photo: Stuart Candy / Situation Lab

Photo: Stuart Candy / Situation Lab

Many thanks to our fantastic Playshop participants, to our awesome facilitation team, and to Niantic and Knight Foundation for spearheading the initiative.

We look forward to further developments in this exciting and fast-moving area, and find it hopeful that processes like these –– supporting rigorous imagining in emerging design spaces, as they are being explored and mapped –– are rapidly finding their way into many organisational and community toolkits, to help new ideas and their implications come into focus.

(Report also posted at Situation Lab website. This version updated 22oct19.)

Related:
> Bringing Futures to Stanford d.school
> On Foresight in Organisations
> On Getting Started in Experiential Futures
> The Thing From The Future / Sitlab project page
> Gaming Futures Literacy (article)
> Transforming the Future (book)

Revisiting The Catalogue

To file under just-in-case-you-haven't-seen-it: British video artist Chris Oakley's brilliant short film The Catalogue (02004).

Preferring to let the thing speak for itself, I won't describe the content, but just want to note that I find it raises an interesting line of thought about the difference between, on the one hand, the modes of visual and narrative representation that make a complex system or technology legible and communicable (especially in prospect, when it doesn't yet exist), and on the other hand, how it might actually work in practice, which may be altogether different.

Drawn to my attention back in January '06 by longtime design collaborator Matt Jensen, I think this video failed to appear previously here at the sceptical futuryst mainly because I didn't start the blog until a few months after that. But a couple of weeks ago, in discussion with Liam Young (of the fabulously interesting Tomorrow's Thoughts Today) I found myself singing the praises of this -- I'm tempted to say classic -- video artifact-from-the-future.

[Update 30nov16: video embed fixed.]

Related posts:
> Surveillance Supreme
> Permission Culture
> Neill Blomkamp, visual futurist

Put on a happy face

There's more than one way to skin a world.

The future isn’t all rosy. Increasing pollution, overpopulation, poverty, and climate change – society’s impact on the earth is reaching a breaking point. And while we may work to slow the onset of these catastrophes, reversing them is no longer an option. The question becomes, how do we live with the troubles we’ve already caused?
[...]
In a troubling future, these augmented reality devices would offer a new dimension - a virtual layer that could be used to “re-skin” the troubling outside world. A boundary between the wearer and the world around him, the device would become a sort of visual drug, used to make the world appear a better place – even if just for a moment.

~"frogConcept: A Digital Escape", frog design News, 16 May 02008

This is a concept design released last week by international creative consultancy frog design -- not dissimilar in promotional intent from other concepts blogged here in recent months.

Among frog's earlier forays into concept design...

The gelfrog (date unknown; image via oobject): "a futuristic laptop for teenagers. [...] The gelfrog converges style and function. The final product is rugged, yet flexible enough to be used in the classroom, in the urban jungle, or on the nature trail."

Tribons (date unknown): "These ultra lightweight and powerful systems connect kids with friends and family and through this provide emotional support which is necessary to compensate the trend of children growing up anonymously in cities and separation caused by increased mobility. [...] The wearable system uses future laser projection technology and is controlled by an intuitive 3D user interface."

Dattoos (02005): "The idea of DNA tattoos (Dattoos) is to use the body itself as hardware and interaction platform, through the use of minimally-invasive, recyclable materials. [...] The final concept aims to achieve a convergence of the following capabilities: DNA-reader and identification technology; nanosensors and interactive "touch reading" for finger tips (Braille); pattern and image recognition; self-learning and educational applications; living materials that change shape and feel; flexible OLED displays; full voice interaction, directional laser speakers; bionic nano chips; and cyborg components."

The Aura (02008): "The Aura concept brings together the professional, responsitory nature of the Western health care system with the personal, preventative focus of alternative therapies... The user never needs to be taught what to do with the object, but can interact with it on his [sic] own terms. While his skin is in contact with the device, different wavelengths of light and sound pass through his skin: infrared light measures blood flow, ultrasonic rays scan the resistance of his skin tissue, others capture the sound and speed of his heartbeat, the firmness of his grip."

In January, the group released a set of concepts under the nebulous rubric "The Role of Tech in 2020"...

The Personal Forcefield: "Fabrics of the future will move beyond cloth to technology-infused supermaterials. Imagine a web of woven conductive filaments and circuits made into everyday clothing that can build up enough kinetic energy generated through walking to be able to recharge a mobile phone. The same fabric has the potential to save up kinetic energy and create a personal forcefield which, when activated, could stun an attacker, unaware of the clothing’s hidden abilities."

The NanoDoor: "Nanobots, an emerging technology that works inside the body, will become a permanent fixture inside our bloodstreams from an early age. Homes will be equipped with a NanoDoor which, once entered, will reconfigure an individual’s nanobots and put the body in prime position for peak performance. Not only will such re-programming of the body’s functions serve to improve overall health, it could also be developed to enhance the body too. Going for a jog on the beach? Then grow some temporary skin-tread on your feet. Long journey ahead? Expand your bladder capacity to avoid unwanted stops on the way. Rock-climbing? Just add some length to your fingers."

The Eye Camera: "Miniaturization of electronic devices will make cameras so small that they could be easily implanted in any part of the body. A camera could be inserted into the eye, mimicking the user’s view as closely as possible and enhancing his or her vision. A wireless network connection and live content via a portal would allow others to log in and literally see the world through the user’s eyes, witnessing private and public activities."

The Digican: "Using a digital spraycan, users can "graffiti" anywhere in the world leaving messages, recommendations, and advertisements on anything from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to the Great Wall of China. With the help of an augmented reality screen that can be worn like a pair of glasses, users will be able to see the virtual graffiti. Ideal for building communities and sharing information, this is the ultimate worldwide wiki, transforming public spaces into places of public expression. Content ranging from personal expression to information on a location to video diaries can be graffitied without permanent damage to historical monuments."

First Life: "The growing network of closed-circuit TV surveillance has the potential to be harnessed to create an immense 3D “virtureal” world in which real people move and interact with virtual subscribers. These virtual subscribers can inhabit a real-time location anywhere in the world, witness real-time events, interact with other virtual inhabitants and communicate with people in an actual location. Special eyewear would allow people in an actual location to view and interact with virtual participants."

Now, of all the concept designs and videos we've seen in recent months, there are typically very few that engage the tricky question of what's actually going on in the world in the future portrayed -- even though that context would have no little bearing upon the viability of the proffered design.

What we have instead with frog's latest, interestingly grim, contribution to our gallery is less augmented reality than portable fantasy. (Of course, some people manage to effect this kind of ontological makeover -- like Voltaire's indefatigably upbeat Dr Pangloss -- with sheer force of personality. Others do it with drugs. Soma, anyone?) But the point I'm getting at is that the usual backdrop for gadget concept designs, if you can call it a backdrop, is as minimalist as can be: an empty black or white background, spartan office buildings or nameless, placeless, rolling green fields against a deep blue sky; the most neutral, washed out, content-free and non-committal of settings. An imaginal vacuum. The Digital Escape by contrast, offers a glimpse, hastily remedied, of a post-collapse future; the one usually concealed in favour of bland, detail-free backdrop; the one disowned and denied by design's chronically Panglossian gizmo parade.

It is rare because it deliberately confronts, and helpfully seeks to mitigate, the depressing prospect of an outside world too horrible to face unmediated: an apocalyptic landscape dressed in more palatable garb. One could ask by what means in a collapsed society such intensive digital content would be delivered to these nifty neo-cowboy bandannas, these anonymising cybermasks, but of course their practicability isn't the point.

There's something resonant, or at least symptomatic, I think, about this fantasy injunction (however tongue-in-cheek) to put on a happy face, to don a mask, in preference to engaging -- and designing -- deeper alternatives to our most unpleasant possible paths. Still, it's unusual because it seems most product design, like most urban planning, and most corporate and government forecasting in Western economies, rests on the cosy assumption of business as usual (with perhaps a concession to contingency in the form of alternative growth rates -- low, medium, and high).

But take a deep breath, and look what happens when the mask slips.

[I got back to Honolulu last night after three weeks on the East Coast, with plenty to blog about, so watch this space...

Also, thanks for the link Natron.]