This is a short film (a fast paced preview of a larger effort) by MAYA Design created to put some perspective on the invisible but fast approaching challenges and opportunities in the pervasive computing age. For more information please visit: http://www.maya.com/practices/research
Really interested in the implications of a trillion-node world? Read Dr. Peter Lucas’s seminal white paper that not only predicted this sort of scaling and complexity but outlined some of the resilient patterns that we need to follow to get there from here.
Homesense is an open research project collaboration between Tinker London and EDF R&D. It brings the open collaboration methods of online communities to physical infrastructures in the home. Instead of having products forced on them through a top-down design process, selected households will create their own smart homes and live with the technologies that they have developed themselves without any prior technical expertise.
It is an environment constructed from thousands of low tech components that can be “rewired” by visitors. The project is a critique of ubiquitous computing “smart homes”, which are based on the idea that technology should be seamless and invisible - removing control and mechanising our lives.
My only criticism would be that in order to make a difference to the way people think this thing should look like a home you could enjoy living in. That said it’s definitely great work and something I’d be very interested to see for myself.
A group exhibit with more than twenty participants, UNPLANNED spans architecture, urban design, industrial design, conceptual art, and cartography to present an array of experimental work at the urban scale. Multi-disciplinary practitioners address emergent urbanism, “wild building”, and other alternatives to conventional urban planning.
The emergent, unplanned city of Hamburg circa 1850, evolved topographically to resemble a human brain. What’s even more interesting is the recent discovery that “brains and cities, as they grow larger, have to be similarly densely interconnected to function optimally.”
During a recent talk in Switzerland (video) Matt Jones introduced the term “Mujicomp”. He said that ubiquitous computing components need to be “tasteful, simple, clear, clean, contemporary and affordable in order to be invited into the home” and that Mujicomp is a key factor in developing a bottom up strategy to building the sentient city.
I couldn’t agree more… but it does worry me a little.
I love the idea and there’s definitely a place in the world - my world even - for Mujicomp but I think we could be in danger of forgetting something.
To understand what (I think) he meant by Mujicomp it’s probably worth looking at the design ethos of Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukosawa. Two designers that introduced the concept of Super Normal in 2007.
The zen-like Super Normal philosophy is about design that’s executed in such a way that it’s easy for people to accept because it effectively becomes part of the existing “normal” in their lives. It upgrades normal but doesn’t shout about it in order to pander to the designer’s ego. It simply dissolves into behaviour.
Naoto Fukosawa’s ”design dissolving into behaviour” quote is frequently used in relation to ubicomp because it’s simmilar in concept to Mark Wieser’s concept of “calm computing”. Fukosawa designined the classic Muji CD player so I can see why it’s logical to end up with Muji as the style benchmark for the consumer Internet of Things but I think we’re in danger of forgetting that the majority of people probably think Muji is posh, boring - or even “poncy”.
I have a feeling that Mujicomp is likely to only be invited into the homes of the people with taste.
If we really want to design the sentient city from the bottom up we shouldn’t forget that the rest of the world aren’t designers. We should also be thinking about those that probably think Billy Big Mouth Bass is something hilarious, and worthy of display on their wall.
This photo from Matt Jones’ Flickr is titled “Not Mujicomp” and he’s right. It certainly isn’t super normal or calm for me but I think we shouldn’t discount the mileage we could get by creating things with such mass appeal.
I know the stuff in that photo is only destined to be landfill and would probably do more harm than good but we’re designers - we can work out how to be funny and sustainable at the same time, surely.
I definitely reckon I’d add funny to the list of attributes we could explore to get networked social objects invited into people’s homes.
