Chat as an important new platform for user experience

Talk about this is increasing all around us (see this piece by Cennyd) and I think it’s time for me to share some of our recent thinking on the topic as well. We believe that conversational user interfaces will be the way that most people will interact with digital systems from the near future on. That can be chat or voice or something else constrained to offer only specific responses or fully freeform. Natural language processing has improved to a point to make this workable and will continue to improve further.

Chat apps are the sine qua non of mobile devices. They are essential, they are everywhere and many of them are cross-platform. People use chat to connect to people but increasingly chat applications are used to interface with non-humans. Chat apps can offer a flat channel to a digital system or facilitate any and all kinds of persistent bots and application logic to be deployed. A great example is this a16z piece on the wide applications of WeChat in China.

The fact that chat apps are cross-platform creates a new smallest common denominator on which you can build applications that are guaranteed to work on all the devices the app runs on. This is a new OS. That people are used to these interactions and normally use them to connect to other people also creates a convenient habituation.

I argue that the bits of conversational logic deployed through chat can be called applications and do most things that apps do.

Most apps allow you to retrieve information or to perform an action. This is glued together with some chrome filled with awkward ever-changing (hamburger menu in or out?) architectures. They need to conform to stringent visual design guidelines while looking recognizably the same across lots of different devices.

Information retrieval and performing actions can be done via chat as well where an AI/bot counterparty will keep track of your context and give you the right cues at the right time. “Slackbot give me a GIF.”“Domoticz turn off the light.”

I am the purveyor of a small app to find good coffee called Cuppings. There is no reason why that same experience could not be delivered through a chat interface. No reason in fact why it could not be delivered better through a chat interface.

Add to that that making good apps is becoming an increasingly difficult endeavour because of device proliferation (mainly on Android), API bloat (on all platforms) and increasingly high visual and interaction design standards. Increasingly making a pixel perfect app that feels nice and works well is something that only larger companies can afford.

Most of the effort we spend right now into user interfaces could be moot if the experience would be delivered through a chat interface. That every app has a different UI and information architecture and that it has to be learned anew is a huge impediment to its adoption. We have recently built several chat based apps & games inspired partially by Lark. During testing we found that users don’t need to be explained anything because they are so familiar with the paradigm.

IMG_0147

Chat is here to stay and I’m incredibly excited to see how far we can push this new medium.

Understanding the Connected Home

The great Peter and Michelle have written a book called “Understanding the Connected Home” based on current developments around the topic and both of their professional interests.

I talked about the topic with Peter a bit and thought it to be a natural extension of his work in the connected devices spaces and their recent visit to Casa Jasmina in Torino.

I hope to get around to reading it soon since right now I have no desire or opportunity to live in a connected home. The housing stock in Berlin is old and does not lend itself well to connectivity. Our current house has a central water heater but even then most faucets are heated locally using electricity. Internet connectivity (let alone Fiber to the Home) is hard to find in many houses and you can count yourself lucky if you can get a Kabel Deutschland connection.

I think I would like to take the best of what these technologies can bring but they probably only make sense if you innovate in the other layers of a house as well as in what is built and the way it is built.

6S

If you look at the six Ss, connectivity consists of things at the manufactured level of Stuff (cheap consumer grade electronics from China). It latches onto the Space Plan and I would guess it has considerable effects on that and would benefit from changes in that plan. More problematically it pierces these layers and as such deteriorates the structural integrity of the house further. Connected things need to either interface with the Services layer or call for new Services to be deployed throughout the house. These move from the inside out but also from the outside —Skin layer— in when it comes to things like solar power and geothermal connectivity.

It seems an interesting though complicated time to be an architect. The API and expectation surface of a house is exploding while the margins and expertise of your average architecture practice leave a lot to be desired.

What would then seem obvious is that we need systematic and generative ways of creating our dwellings in which the inhabitants of a house are participants as much as the traditional experts are. It seems like connected homes will make more sense and sense made of them when you consider the movements of self-built buildings and open source dwellings.

Nakagin Capsule Tower

Yesterday I saw the documentary on the Nakagin Capsule Tower by Rima Yamazaki as part of the DOKU.ARTS festival here in Berlin. I wasn’t aware of this landmark during my last visit to Tokyo though I must have passed close by while cycling through the city. I’ll make a point to see it when next I visit if it still stands because that is exactly the topic of the documentary.

The tower is a prime example of Metabolist architecture by Kisho Kurokawa. Metabolism is a hard to define but influential strand of architecture that is described in the documentary as an architecture without timelag. It turns out that the tower by now, though charming with its tiny rooms, is outdated and unmaintainable. Most of the owners want to tear it down and have something new built there that makes more economic sense. Among architects and historians there are voices for preserving it as a monument to an important movement in Japanese architecture and other who think it could indeed be torn down.

Lindenstraße

The main reason why I wanted to see this movie is because next week I’m moving into a building in Berlin designed by a metabolist architect Arata Isozaki. He appears in the movie as a member of the metabolist movement and as an proponent of conservation. I found his reasoning to be somewhat incoherent and overly sentimental. I’m not sure what that means for the building I will be living in but we’ll see. I’ve only been there once, but I absolutely love the building pictured above. Time will tell whether that is justified.

Another architect Toyo Ito who expressed a disillusionment with metabolism was in favor of tearing it down. His reasoning is that buildings just like people are finite and that if they have fulfilled their purpose they should be allowed to disappear to be replaced by something new. This is a way of thinking about architecture that is mostly alien if you live in Europe but that I find to be extremely refreshing. I think our local hangups on history and current efforts to construct buildings in a historicized fashion are morbid but this is the way we do things in Europe.

All along during the documentary I had to think about some William Gibson I read about Tokyo but which I cannot find right now. So instead I’ll post this from My Own Private Tokyo that I came across.

The Japanese, you see, have been repeatedly drop-kicked, ever further down the timeline, by serial national traumata of quite unthinkable weirdness, by 150 years of deep, almost constant, change. The 20th century, for Japan, was like a ride on a rocket sled, with successive bundles of fuel igniting spontaneously, one after another.

Breaking into the English speaking world

Last week we finally got featured with Bycatch on Boingboing and Fast Company thanks to our invitation to the XOXO festival. It is amazing to see what that attention does and what kind of effect that has on sales.

Now that we have finally arrived in the English speaking world we can relax a bit and keep pushing out the marketing we had planned all along. I would be curious to see whether something similar happens at some point for Japanese and Chinese speaking online communities.

The redesign of Moritzplatz roundabout

This is turning into a traffic blog more than anything else. After taking stock of the plans for the new Maaßenstraße which is very slowly nearing completion, now let’s take a look at another place close to my heart: Moritzplatz. The square is right underneath my office and as such I cross it several times daily both on foot and by bike.

Cyclist get hits on MoritzplatzA couple of weeks ago week an accident took place there where a cyclist was touched by a car. No big deal in his case, but it could have been worse considering the way motorists behave here. I have to pay close attention every time I cross this roundabout otherwise this could happen to me as well.

Redesign

Two weeks ago they started marking what is to be the revamped Moritzplatz. I had my hopes up that it would be a serious improvement but judging from the plans it is mostly going to be a new paint job.

New lines on MoritzplatzThe paint job will separate the bicycle lane with stripes from the car lane narrowing the space the cars get and widening the space the bicycles get. The cycle lane itself will be painted bright red. New lines on Moritzplatz

Cycling on the new markings and adhering to the new situation is a bit weird but it does feel like it’s going to be an improvement. It is however not going to fix the most important problem with the square1.

Redesign Moritzplatz

The new situation for cyclists

Cyclists get their lane doubled in width and protected by markings. Whether that protection will mean anything in reality remains to be seen. Cars in Berlin will drive anywhere they please. What is a bigger problem on this roundabout and what will remain so in the new situation is that it is unclear who has precedence on the points where cyclists and cars have to cross each other. The angle with which the two cross has also remained the same so you really have to pay attention not to hit a cyclist and not to get hit by a car. A real solution would have been to mark the roundabout with Sharks’ teeth and maybe even to elevate the cycle path. That way cars entering and leaving the roundabout notice that they do so physically. Physical separations on the road make the power dynamic a little less unbalanced like you can see in this example from California. They are of course also expensive. There are roundabouts in the Netherlands that are laid out this defensively even though that usually is not necessary. Schermafbeelding-2012-07-03-om-13.52.56-480x309

The new situation for pedestrians

Pedestrians around Moritzplatz have really been shafted and they are getting a tiny improvement in the new situation. For a pedestrian there is no safe way to cross the square. The underground crossing through the U-Bahn station does not count. Going down and up stairs2 isn’t an option for disabled people and it’s too much effort for most people in general. Traffic should be safe for its weakest participants so that it benefits everybody. Let’s take a look at the various options to cross Moritzplatz. Keep in mind that you will often have to cross at least one arm of the roundabout to get anywhere. West – There is no way to cross the road here except for the traffic light at Stallschreiberstraße. This traffic light feels broken for pedestrians because during rush hour it gives you about 12 seconds to make the crossing. Almost nobody makes it across during the green phase and everybody knows that the red phase takes forever so people also cross when it’s already red3. The traffic light is not an option for crossing Moritzplatz since it is 50m away. That is too far. North – On this side there is an island in the road where pedestrians are relatively safe so at least they don’t have to make the entire crossing in one go. It is still unsafe because there isn’t a zebra crossing but it’s better than nothing. East – There is no way to cross here except for the pedestrian crossing 50m down Oranienstraße. South – A new pedestrian island is planned here. Unfortunately it is 15m off the main arm but that is better than 50m. Just like at the other islands, there won’t be a zebra crossing there which makes any pedestrian trying to cross still a potential victim. Redesign Moritzplatz

It doesn’t matter if there is no way to cross the road, people still do of course. Even if you pay attention and cross the road when there is no traffic, incoming cars expect to be able to push you off the road4. At which point you are forced to run across or be killed.

The main flaw here is that people shouldn’t be forced to walk ten or fifty meters more to make things more convenient for motorized traffic. People are more important than cars.

Update: The work is nearing completion and actually the new markings do not seem to make that much of a difference except to cause everybody on the square to be fairly stressed out.

I guess this adequately describes all of us.

  1. Thankfully it’s not going to be botched as badly as the redesigned Kottbusser Tor roundabout. []
  2. Moritzplatz does not have an elevator for some strange reason. []
  3. German pedestrian lights don’t have a blinking green phase in between green and red. []
  4. I actually cannot comprehend how this is acceptable behaviour and why these people are allowed on the road at all. []

Encounter Zone Maaßenstraße

Berlin is rebuilding the Maaßenstraße into the first Begegnungszone (‘Encounter Zone’) of its kind in the city. Works are underway now after a public consultation was finished last year or the year before. I looked around a bit but I couldn’t find the plans for what they are actually building there. A quick e-mail to the senate solved that problem and I got a PDF of the plan.

Redesigning Maaßenstraße

The most important bit of that plan is the layout of the new street which is dramatically different from what we have right now. Maaßenstraße is a street in Berlin saturated with cafes and restaurants where people from far West Berlin will go to go out on weekend nights. It also touches on Motzstraße which is a popular gay going out area and there are tons more bars and restaurants littered about. On Saturdays the market on Winterfeldtplatz is brimful of people and blocks most of the traffic on the South side.

The quantity of establishment is deceiving since the gastronomy on Maaßenstraße is of such a low quality that I wouldn’t regularly visit any of the places there except the two Turkish kebab places Hasir and the Keb’up House (for the late night döner box).

Traffic wise there used to be bike paths on the pavement but because of the heavy use by pedestrians and the fact that the bike path was level with the walking area, these caused dangerous situations. The road itself wasn’t a great alternative as it was used mostly for parking, double parking and the ostentatious display of muscle cars at night. All in all the usage of the street was thoroughly out of whack with how space was distributed between the various groups.

The new plan removes parking altogether which may or may not work depending on the enforcement level. Cars can park anywhere they want in Berlin and receive a fine that is so low nobody really cares about it. Cycling and driving are integrated on the remaining piece of road that is a lot more narrow than it was and lots of space is allotted to pedestrians walking and hanging out on the street. I have no idea what that is going to do to the noise levels in the street but I don’t live on a popular party street for a reason.

I’ve annotated what I think is noteworthy about the plan below (in a 13MB image file, click for big). All in all the plan looks solid and is bolder than I could have hoped for. It remains to be seen how it will be received by drivers and whether the police enforces the zones that are on there with vigour.

06-Flyer_Begegnungszone_maassenstr

Jumping to the end by Matt Jones

Matt Jones: Jumping to the End — Practical Design Fiction from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

Matt Jones gives an overview of the kind of work he used to do at BERG and then talks about the process of his creative work at Google. It’s refreshing to see that practice is shifting towards media that is readily consumable and deliverables that actually do something.

Matt_Jones_Jumping_to_the_End_--_Practical_Design_Fiction_on_Vimeo_2015-03-11_16-52-01

Product design focused on user wants

This post was previously published on Medium and is now archived here.

There’s some recent writing about the decomposition of apps into either thin slivers of single purpose functionality per app or even breaking out of the traditional app domain entirely and delivering their functionality through for instance the notifications screen.

I think both of these are onto something but that the trend itself is more fundamental. I think there are three things happening.

1. Apps can be decomposed into high-level user wants.

A want starts with “I want”and is followed by getting or creating something often accompanied by some social intermediation. Such a want could be “I want to send a message”or it could be “I want to read (and reply to) my messages”or it could be “I want to find a place to eat.”

These are not utilities. Most interesting apps these days are lifestyle apps. Focusing on a single want does not mean the app becomes easier to make. Implementing a want with its very specific functionality, appropriate context, user interface and communication may be even more difficult. A want is a summary of what used to be called ‘user stories’ but focused on what people want to do not on what people are supposed to do. At the risk of sounding obvious: people don’t want to do things they don’t want to do. The exception to this is work where people do things they don’t want to do. People want apps that bring them entertainment, social connections or self-actualisation.

2. Apps cannot support more than a couple of wants well.

Any app that tries to cram in more than a couple of wants from different domains starts to creak and feel cluttered. This looks like the main reason why Foursquare unbundled the totally disparate wants of local discovery “I want to find a good restaurant now”and that of social broadcasting “I want to tell my friends where I am.”

Such unbundling is becoming the norm because an app cannot do everything well without containing multiple apps. Just think back of Facebook’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink app with its own homescreen. The Facebook app itself is becoming more and more bare while wants are increasingly delivered by apps that don’t show they belong to Facebook.

This is a good indicator of what the future holds for these apps. I would for instance be surprised if complicated list management features would be a significant part of the future Foursquare mobile app. Lists do support local discovery but they will never have the mass appeal the app is focusing on.

3. Wants can be fulfilled anywhere you want.

This ties into Naveen’s piece about the notifications becoming the app. I would take this further and say that the app will be wherever people interact with a connected device. Building an app becomes a matter of translating a user want into the interaction affordances of a medium.

You could indeed read and reply to messages in a notification screen if that is where you spend your time. But soon you might do the same thing using the same app but on your connected watch. In a somewhat more distant future you might send a Yo! by slamming two IoT enabled rocks together.

The medium through which a want is fulfilled has become flexible. What matters is the want itself and appropriateness. A talented designer will figure out whether a translation makes sense and how to best implement it.

All in all this is a great development. Digital design is breaking out of screens enabling it to find us where we are and offer us the things we really want.

The Selim Varol Collection

Last Saturday I made it out to the penultimate day of the exhibition of the Selim Varol Collection in the me collectors room here in Berlin. I’m glad I did. This was one of the most complete and stunning collections of contemporary toys and subversive art on display anywhere.

Most of the fun is in the sheer completionism of certain walls and cabinets. Acquiring everything past the point of simple fun. Add to that trying to recognize what everything is about, what the references and twists in the various works are.

What adds to the power of a well done private collection such as this one is its lack of fear. It doesn’t need to be backed up artistically, there’s no curator hedging their bets or trying to cultivate relations, it isn’t afraid not to be taken for full and in short: it isn’t uptight (modern art take note).

One room of the Selim Varol collection. Striking, subversive and contemporary stuff. Thanks for the tip @thewavingcat!

Obey Atatürk (‘o bey’ also means ‘that gentleman is’)

Selim Varol collection - toys

photo 2.JPG

Pane

Toys

Room

Batman

Nude

Fairey

dConstruct on the future, progress and play

I didn’t make it out to dConstruct which I’m a bit torn about. I’ve been to the conference some three times and htis year other priorities trumped it and going to conferences in general. But the program this year was even more stellar than regular years. Seeing either Ben Hammersley, Tom Armitage or James Burke (!) present would be worth the ticket price alone without exaggerating a lot.

When the theme ‘Playing with the Future’ was announced I was already thinking that Paul Virilio should feature in it. Can somebody confirm to me whether he has been referenced at all? Too often designers put their belief wholesale into the notion of progress and a heavy-weight counterpoint to that thinking would be more or less essential.

And best of all was hearing from a distance about Tom Armitage’s presentation which seemed to be really good and focuses on the same things we do in our practice: play and making.

https://twitter.com/monkchips/status/244104752739266560

As fellow game makers that very notion is at the heart of many of the things we do and it is a talk I will definitely be catching on the conference recordings which are already online.

Designing in the Face of Defeat

Jan Chipchase’s ‘Red Mat’ design experiment is brilliant by itself, but is goes much further than being just a design experiment.

The opening of the essay that sets the contextual framework for the project is for me the most interesting part:

By now there are very few people left on the planet that aren’t in some way impacted by globalisation — as producers and consumers — those few who make a decision to opt-out must do so consciously. Yet our touch points to this interconnected system that churns out ever more, ever faster inherently limits our understanding of the whole. We can talk about globalisation, buy into it, buy from it, demonstrate against it, but for most of us its scale and complexity defies comprehension. Part of the machine is dedicated to designing, prototyping, testing and pushing to market connected products and services that know more about us, than we ever will about them.

It’s as if we were standing on the top of a hill and are now running at full pelt into the fog below — not quite knowing what lies ahead, letting gravity and momentum carry us, and doing our best to avoid the silhouettes of objects as they loom into view, chased by the fear of stopping.

We are living in an increasingly interconnected, and increasingly automated world. The consequences of our actions may be road-mapped, extrapolated, scenarioed, but ultimately, at best it is smart guesswork.

Chipchase posits products and services as withdrawn objects that are unknowable to us by their scale and complexity but both of those are just symptoms of the unknowability of objects in general. This is in line with most of the current thinking on objects in speculative realism.

For us designers, makers the question then is: given such a bleak view of knowability in the world at large and of objects in particular, what are successful strategies for creating these products and services. More succinctly: How do we design in the face of defeat?

The writing about the new aesthetic that has reached a tipping point in the last week is one way of dealing with —or at least cataloging— the algorithmic complexity in the world around us, but as Chipchase’s welcome mat shows, all objects carry with them so much weight that even the simplest ones become unfathomably complex.

I’m mulling over how to proceed. One preliminary idea: we should do away with all strategic design and business theory and just make things. But then again, we were already doing that.

Early 2012 Events

The year has started nicely and the event line-up is already brimful.

Thursday a week ago saw the iBestuur Congress in the Netherlands where the winners of the Apps voor Nederland competition were announced. I’m happy to see this last app competition to a succesful end and I look forward to what more we can bring. See a write-up of them over at the Hack de Overheid site.

Last weekend I was joined here by fellow game makers from the Netherlands to participate in the Berlin Global Game Jam. We fought hard and managed to crank out the unparalleled Nakatomi Rider. Niels wrote it up for the papers (available over at Bashers).

This week in Berlin the Transmediale takes place to which I hope to go in the following days. I have a difficult relationship with art, especially when it is in the domain of media, but watching the Graham Harman lecture tonight and the introduction to it, it was clear to me that Transmediale is as on top of current developments and artistic relevance as they can be.

Upcoming

There will be a night in Pakhuis de Zwijger to celebrate the Nederland van Boven television series that the VPRO produced in the Netherlands1. I will be joining the esteemed panel there as a board member of Hack de Overheid to talk about issues of democracy, participation and truth in cartography.

With Martijn de Waal happily having gotten his PhD2, it’s now full steam ahead for the conference he is organizing together with Michiel de Lange called “Social Cities of Tomorrow”3. I will be speaking in a brief time slot about Apps for Amsterdam and how data commons happen.

I will probably be attending LIFT to see a certain person speak.

Finally in the near future there is also an undisclosed Berlin event for which I will be speaking which will be my first abroad since I left the Netherlands.

  1. Borrowing conceptually from Britain from Above among others. []
  2. Whose thesis I am very much looking forward to read, which is something of an exception when it comes to theses. []
  3. As luck will have it last year I travelled from Amsterdam to Berlin for a virtual urbanism conference and this year I will do the reverse (though with a brief trip to Madrid tacked to its end). []

Code Camping Amsterdam Imminent

I’m incredibly proud of the team and events coming together in our organization of the biggest Hack de Overheid feature yet. Looking back on the past year, it has been an incredible ride with the various Apps for… competitions and no small amount of personal and professional changes.

At the end of this month, on Saturday the 26th, we’ll be holding a Hack de Overheid event like you’re used to with some notable additions that are going to blow everybody’s mind. The event is called Code Camping Amsterdam, it is part of the Apps voor Nederland program in collaboration with Waag Society and you can register on the bottom of the page.

We’ll be having three internationally renowned speakers whose work alone speaks for itself, let alone their presence on our event. Marietje Schaake is our most favourable representation in the European Parliament but as far as I know a politician of her stature has never before spoke in front of an audience of Makers in the Netherlands before. Marius Watz‘s visual art inspires awe and wonder and I have used his software on several occasions in my work for Monster Swell. Matt Biddulph‘s work and shipped products have been used by most of the people I know and inspired me and I think many more programmers to build more and better.

The location in the derelict Toren Overhoeks1 is a culmination both of convenience and inconvenience. Just across the central train station, but without any facilities left in the building2 it exemplifies a once and future state of our cities. Remnants of an age gone by where hackers gather with makeshift facilities to create something better.

After the event there is going to be a party by the Eddie the Eagle Museum a formation famous in their own right for holding the most out there awesome parties in the city3. It is a privilege working together with people this competent when it comes to fun and so creative when it comes to convention. See their party description:

The future has found us! And its leader is a code. Our digitally hypnotised desire has led to a world without mistakes, governed by spyware and malware. Humanity is an experiment proved inferior. Let’s crack the code to correct it. Enter the Hackathon and exuberantly celebrate a world without errors! With high, low and no-tech, we are the new Trojan Horses marching in, ritually erasing the failings of the past. Let’s roughly and frantic lose our last human bit with a codefest in the Tower of the Shell.

Finally as I have hinted before, the currency for application contests is diminishing along with the consolidation of the open data platforms and the publication of more and more datasets. If after Apps voor Nederland is over, you follow-up with another cookie-cutter competition, that would be missing the point. That also means that this competition is the best moment to get your datasets out and get attention for them in the ecosystem as it is right now. What will be next? We have some ideas, but we don’t know anything for sure yet. The only thing that is certain: you’d better be there next Saturday!

  1. Formerly known as the Shell Tower as it was the location from which Shell’s infamous post-colonial regime was directed from. []
  2. Those were all torn out by Shell when they left. Such pleasant people… []
  3. And I’m not exaggerating when I say that. Their work is legendary. []

Bericht uit de Game Garden

Ik doe recentelijk een stukje over games voor Fast Moving Targets en wat beter te vertellen dan mijn ervaringen uit de Dutch Game Garden. Het is een leuke plek in Utrecht, waar veel gebeurt, maar wat in Amsterdam bijna niet aankomt. Een poging om een brug te slaan:

We doen het in het vervolg elke keer uit een andere studio (dat moet ook wel lukken met 30 game bedrijven) met korte interviewtjes.

Week 241

Apps voor Nederland continues apace as it keeps on doing.

Talks about open data and data journalism are ongoing at a number of Dutch parties. After last year’s attention, it seems that this year various parties are indeed getting serious about it.

Then I went to a talk by Michael LaFond at ARCAM in Amsterdam about the Berlin co-housing movement that he started in part1. All the more interesting because I am moving to Berlin in January of next year and we’re already registered at several projects on Wohnportal Berlin, the site he setup. Several of the projects he showed during the evening also have our attention as prospective Berlin living space. My notes for the evening and a more elaborate write-up of the Q&A are up on this blog.

I built a next iteration for guadalupe that is indeed becoming more playable as we speak. I am very eager to invite more people to that play experience sometime soon.

Wednesday we announced the first speaker for Code Camping Amsterdam: Matt Biddulph. We’re really excited to have Matt come over to Amsterdam again.

Went to Booreiland to work on culiacan.

New temporary desks

At long last I posted the pictures I took of people visiting our office with my Yashica medium format camera.

My review of The Binding of Isaac was published in nrc.next.

Long lost glory

Sunday we had a marathon meeting for the constitution of the merged foundation that is going to be the greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts Hack de Overheid and Het Nieuwe Stemmen. I am very excited for the potential of the new organization.

  1. For some reason many of the new thing happening in Berlin seem to be started by non-locals, but maybe that’s a normal thing everyweher. []

Week 240

This was a short week. Work on Apps voor Nederland and then off to Playful.

Nice to see that Peter Robinett is running AMStransit in his office on a spare screen:
The office now has a glanceable transit screen thanks to @alper's AMSTransit http://amstransit.monsterswell.com/

Hack de Overheid announced Code Camping Amsterdam which is going to be our biggest event yet in a derelict office across the IJ in Amsterdam. Everything is in full effect to organize that.

Playful was great and it’s always nice to be in London for a short stretch. It was a while that I was last in Conway Hall but it was nice to be back. Niels and Kars have written detailed accounts about the day on Hubbub and Bashers.

Great to be back here.

Then in the same weekend (flying into Schiphol in the morning, directly in the car to Germany) it was off to the Ruhrgebiet in Germany to visit among others the Jahrhunderthallen and the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord.

Jahrhundert water tower

Michael LaFond – Berlin Co-Housing

I was at an event organized by ARCAM tonight concerning co-operative housing projects which are already very popular in Berlin but are rapidly expanding to other cities. Amsterdam is busy launching its own initiative and Michael LaFond from Berlin presented their experiences with this way of building.

It was an interesting evening to attend. The slides were poorly visible from the back, but I managed to jot down a large part of the Q&A where most of the action was. It is interesting to see how eager for knowledge the Amsterdam crowd is. It strikes me as odd that building a house yourself would be novel, but given the market as it is, it is. Also: the Dutch with their capacity for trade and organization should be pretty good at this thing. If that will be so, remains to be seen.

Notes first quoted:

Muni of Amsterdam is going to emit a bunch of self building plots

There’s going to be an event this weekend in Houthaven for the first batch of plots.

Michael LaFond, American Architect living and working in Berlin
id22, Institute for Creative Sustainability

started Wohnportal-Berlin

focus on co-housing, community organized housing projects

daz – köpenickerstraße

local innovation, community
baugemeinschaften, hausvereine

emphasizes participation in cooperative and community oriented designs
organize Wohnportal, platform for architects and housing activists to get their project out there

last year: started working with people in other European cities

organizing a tour of the creative sustainability projects around the city

An increased demand even in participation.

Berlin:
1.9M housing units / 3.5M residents
1.82 person/unit
70m2/unit
40m2/person
Weak presence of corporations on the market though everybody leases.

Since 2009 Berlin offers land to Baugemeinschaften at fixed prices.
The best concept and not the highest bidder wins.
Criteria:
1. Neighborhood and community orientation
2. Architecture and urban design
3. Sustainability and ecology
4. Financing

Change in economy and demography forces Berlin like Amsterdam to look at the concept of building houses yourself.

Baugemeinschaften started in Tübingen and Freiburg

List of examples among which:
* Möckernkiez, public access
* Spreefeld Berlin, secured a road to the land and got the land cheap from the Federal Government, some of the best architects in Berlin
* AH+, outside of the city center, buildings will produce more energy than they consume

Baugemeinschäfte are growing larger to the 100 and more houses per project

Co Housing Cultures book due to be out

blok0.nl
amsterdam.nl/zelfbouw

Manifestation this weekend with the release of 300 plots.

Initiator of the Vrijburg Project, landscape architect also present.
Vrijburg has failed in collaborating with Nuon to create sustainable energy projects.

Now the questions as much as I could transcribe them:

Q: How do you manage people who want to rent? Or people with unequal incomes.
LaFond: 3 of the projects are affordable housing, some in re-adapting existing buildings. People pay €5-6/m2. There are examples of non-profit cooperations. People that really don’t have any money, can’t live there.

Q: The real-estate market in Amsterdam is rather transparent. Transactions are being done between housing corporations, developers and the city. Can co-housing create more transparency in the housing market? So that fairer pricing of land becomes a possibility?
LaFond: By making the scale of projects smaller that becomes easier. For democracy, the equal distribution of land is very important.

Q: The self-build aspect? Who carries the risk if the plan fails?
LaFond: You can have affordable houses from non-self-organized projects and vice versa. People that do have money: a core group forms and they look for a piece of land with or without an architect, or they apply to a city land auction, with a group facilitator. They identify the concept and organize a Baugemeinschaft. People bring their own money and they need to go to the bank themselves for credit. The ones without money need to get support from a foundation or other organization. The main reason that projects don’t succeed is because they can’t find any affordable land.

Q: How important is the role of the architect?
LaFond: If you want to emphasize the group or community, the focus should be with them. There’s always the combination of the future inhabitants, the architect and the moderator. The most important thing in Berlin is that people adhere more strictly to the division of roles and don’t try to play multiple parts.

Q: Do the architects design the energy systems?
LaFond: Almost always there will somebody extra working on that.

Q: How do people find it?
LaFond: There’s the website. The events where people come together and word of mouth about the project. Some architecture firms have their own waiting lists for people who want to be on the next project.

Q: What’s the role of the moderators?
LaFond: There’s no investor/developer for these projects, that’s why they are more affordable. Btu that’s also why it demands more intensive participation. They need to understand people and organize them. Manage relations. Sometimes have to protect participants from the architects. There are not that many people who can do this and want to do this. Most architects can’t or don’t want to do this. (There seem to be companies specialized in this.)

Bob van der Zande (stad Amsterdam, Zelfbouw) also present.

Q: Is the municipality thinking about social housing in the next 10 years?
Van der Zande: We are hoping that there are so many different houses being planned that the option of social housing will materialize.

LaFond: Some of the co-operative projects will give people the money they invested back but they cannot sell or speculate on the house themselves. This changes the house from a property on the market into something that is there to use. More projects like that are needed to guarantee affordable housing in a city on the long term. If people can make money on their property and there’s nothing to prevent it, it is not odd that they will do so.

Q: How is the other obstacle (that of financing) being tackled?
LaFond: Constructions take some time to develop. Umweltbank and GLS bank are very important for these projects. They make less money from the interest and they have a greater desire to support ecological and social projects. It happens that people can collectively apply for money to get credit so not everybody needs to have the same amout of money. GLS is the best example in Germany. They offer different kinds of Burgschaften, you need to have a combination of money, income, property, or a relative who has money. Now also Kleinburgschaften: 25 people can all risk €3000 to join together and cover the risk. Das Miethäusersyndicat (started in Freiburg) exists to help housing groups to buy their buildings and renovate them. Because they have so many buildings now they can get credit to do more buildings. These structures took 20 some years to develop.
Stiftung Trias and Edith Marien Stiftung don’t like private ownership much. They work to take land away from the market. Community land trusts.

Vrijburg architect: In Amsterdam one bank is interested in these projects: the Rabobank. All the other banks are running away.

Wat moet je doen met gamification?

Ik was twee weken geleden op een bijeenkomst van de STT over serious games en ik was een beetje teleurgesteld dat de enige kritische reflectie op het onderwerp van de dag —kansen in serious games en gamification— kwam van super-filosoof Jos de Mul. Hoe goed zijn kritiek dan ook was, kritiek van een filosoof is te gemakkelijk weg te wuiven door mensen uit de praktijk. Nederland blijf een land van handelaars en nering is hier de makkelijkste manier om de handen op elkaar te krijgen.

Wij blijven serieuze reserveringen houden bij het klakkeloos doorvoeren van gamification. We denken dat een fijnzinnigere aanpak wenselijk is omdat de problemen ingewikkeld zijn en deze spellen dagelijks door echte mensen gebruikt worden. In onze praktijk bij Hubbub maken we serious games en dat doen we tot tevredenheid van klanten en spelers al zeg ik het zelf. Waar het gamification betreft ben ik één van de eerste aanjagers van Foursquare in Nederland. Ik ben me dus terdege bewust van de mogelijkheden en beperkingen van deze aanpak.

Ik wil mensen en organisaties die iets willen doen hiermee oproepen om professionele hulp in de arm te nemen. Je wilt mensen die een track record hebben in het maken van spellen die werken voor de mensen die ze spelen én voor de bedrijven die ze inzetten. Dat betekent in dit geval Hubbub of andere bedrijven die werken met echte spelontwerpers. Wij zitten niet exact te springen om meer te doen, maar we zien tegelijk wel een acute behoefte aan ervaring uit de praktijk.

Communicatie- en interactieve bureau’s doen nu een paar slides over gamificatie in hun strategie-pitches om het concept ‘meegenomen te hebben’ maar ze zijn zich vrijwel nooit bewust van de complexiteit en nuances van games en systemen.

Het zijn goedbedoelde pogingen, maar ze slaan bijna altijd de plank mis. Als je echt duurzame waarde wilt creëren kun je beter direct bij een goede partij aankloppen.

Week 238

Blit Alper

Another piece on an interesting game published in nrc.next. This week a critical review of the selective enforcement of the App Store guidelines in the case of Phone Story a game that is itself a critique of the iPhones it runs on. An indictment of Apple makes for an easy piece to write.

Geodata hero, Simeon Nedkov at the Open Data Bazaar with a very appropriate t-shirt:
Innovate or die - Hack de overheid

Tuesday saw the Hack de Overheid event called the Open Data Bazaar. It was a massive success with well over a hundred people from all over the Netherlands. Lots of students were present and lots of hacking went on throughout the day. There was also a brimful workshop program where birds of a feather discussed the current state of open data in the Netherlands.

Hacked together a display of transit information with @dvbosch and data from @openov

During the bazaar I worked together with Dirk van Oosterbosch to make an Arduino driven matrix display that shows the departure time of the next bus from the venue. It doesn’t get more situated than that and I’m glad we can whip something like that up in a couple of hours. It shows that we have come quite a way since first we started with this stuff.

Megapolis Underground - Research institute for the built environment

Wednesday I visited OTB at Delft, University of Technology. OTB is the research institute for the built environment, the theoretical backing for the faculty of Engineering, Policy and Management (at which I got a minor in Management of Technology during my studies). I will be consulting with geodata experts in the Netherlands on developer relations so the data and standards they are working on are such that they will be easy to develop with.

I also visited my old faculty which has been taken over by architecture students after their building burnt down. I must say I have never seen our buildings in better order.

I hardly recognize my old faculty.

In the afternoon we paid a site visit to what is to be the location of the next Hack de Overheid event “Code Camping Amsterdam”. Some of you may already have surmised where it is going to be. Announcements are due next week but suffice it to say that it is going to be massive. We are going to be coinciding with a massive Eddie the Eagle Museum party on the same venue after our event. Something of a departure from previous years but one which should prove to be very fun.

Auditorium from above

Thursday I spent all day at Bits of Freedom to help them with the #doyourbit fundraiser. Being an independent organization BoF are more dependent on private donations. We love them to death and Hack de Overheid is more than a bit complementary so I try to help them out whenever I can. That Thursday I spent all day at their offices and tweeted like wildfire with a bunch of other volunteers to reach the Dutch internet and get them to donate.

Spending the day helping Bits of Freedom fight for an open and free internet.

That same night there was an event about games in the Stedelijk Museum. It was somewhat problematic testified to by these pieces written by Arjen and Niels. Arjen’s piece quite precisely mirrors my qualms about the evening (see also my comment).

Hoogerbrugge going into awkward pervert mode

Friday was something of a write-off due to the volume of activities that had happened during the week. Fortunately the symposium of the STT. The day was a nice get-together with most people in the Netherlands active in the field of gaming.

The thickest section is about serious games for the elderly.

Gamification interlude

What was disappointing though not very surprising was the fact that all of the critical reflection on the day’s topic —opportunities in serious games and gamification— came from philosopher-hero Jos de Mul. Which solid as it was, coming from a philosopher, may be too easy to dismiss. The rest was profiteering. The Dutch remain a merchant nation at heart and anything that generates income will be applauded however morally dubious it may be.

The issues that we have with both of these concepts are real and they need a considered and nuanced approach. In our practice we make serious games and we seem to be doing quite ok if I may say so myself. When it comes to gamification, I am one of the principal instigators of Foursquare in the Netherlands so I am intimately aware with both the methods and their shortcomings.

Given that, I would urge people and organizations who want to do something in this field to seek professional help. That means get in touch with us or with other organizations that employ bona fide game designers. We are not exactly shy for more things to do but there is a clear need for guidance in this field. In any case make sure to work with people who have a track record in designing playful experiences that cater both to the wishes of the humans playing them and to the goals of the businesses commissioning them.

Agencies are currently including gamification as a slide in their strategy deck, paying lip service to the concept to make a quick buck. If you want to enable them doing that, you are free to do so. But if you want to create real value, why take the long way round?

Interlude over. That Saturday I went to the movie night at Filmhuis Cavia organized by the guys from Popup City. I wrote about that on this blog at: Stop Kicking the Creative Class.

And I also procured a Huawei X5 to play around with. This seems to be the first Chinese manufacturer that has found a low price point for a device that is still highly capable. The Kenyan market has been flooded with the €99 little brother of this phone, the X3.

Stop Kicking the Creative Class

I was at a meeting this weekend by the Pop-up City and the documentary displayed about urban development fits into a wider recent trend where people kick the creative class and blame them for society’s ills. Usually the dreaded specter of gentrification is pulled out to show how apathetic and different and outright bad the Creative Class1 are.

The documentary shown last weekend “Creativity and the Capitalist City” by Tino Buchholz actually showed an interesting and nuanced picture of urban development. Unfortunately this was marred by the rabid and insubstantial left-wing outings of the movie maker afterwards. That discussion did oust a lot of resentment that I think needs to be addressed more openly and more honestly than it currently is.

As was remarked in die Zeit recently about the same issue in Berlin: the only thing worse than gentrification is no gentrification. The debate is a lot more heated over there because of the massive influx of hipsters and their friends from all over the world into an impoverished city. A trust fund takes you a lot further in Neukölln than it does in Bushwick, but it also sparks xenofobic pamflets and immolation of vehicles.

I am a part of that same creative class —if you want to use a blanket term— and probably also a cause of gentrification. But I am sick of apologizing for our success. We picked a profession, we worked hard, we created value (we are not bankers) and now we are winning. Well I can tell you: it feels good to be winning.

It is perverse to rest the blame of society’s ills on those people actually doing something with their lives. I have had this problem before. If you’re a successful migrant in the messed up social debate in the Netherlands, you were nearly forced to apologize for your own success to the rest who were not. I sure as hell wasn’t going to do that. The only solution is to ignore the naysayers. It always is of course.

I can do what I am doing because of a lot of hard work and perseverance. The field of study I got a Masters in is definitely not one of the easier ones at my university but it does guarantee you a job in a wide number of techno-creative fields. For some strange reason people still are not lining up to go to technical universities, and most that do go do not finish it. Complaining to somebody else must be easier than actually working to secure your own future.

It is hard enough already in the attention starved world to stay up to date with your close ones without having to take into account every other person. Even more so if your outlook is international and you want to participate and compete on a trans-national level. A rare enough thing as it is. Should we do stuff for our neighborhood? Sure, but who should bear the onus? Shouldn’t the people who want to do stuff, maybe start something themselves and see where it goes?

Working in a creative profession is subject to taste but it is in many ways also highly meritocratic. Those with affluent parents and large networks will divide a larger piece of pie among themselves. But if you work hard and put in the effort with just a spark of vision, it will most certainly amount to something in the long run. If it doesn’t, change yourself and try something else. Keep trying until you find something that works. Is that difficult? Maybe, but it is also the only way.

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.”—Thomas Edison

There are a ton of jobs in technology right now. Amsterdam cannot find itself enough interaction designers, interface designers, front-end engineers and programmers to fill current jobs. The shortage is large enough that a lot of growth opportunities are being hampered by it. Literally all comers will be able to get a job. So get at it. Teach yourself something, find a course and persevere for a couple of years. You may strike gold.

“You can tell yourself anything is too difficult, or you can just do it.
You just need to be hungry.”— http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/opinion/sunday/i-went-back-to-the-land-to-feed-my-family.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

We, the employed, already pay taxes. As a base that should be enough. If anybody out there is failing to keep up their end of the bargain, it’s the government we are paying the taxes to. They are bailing out the rich and keeping the poor ignorant with well meant institutional schemes that rarely amount to anything (just look at the Wire). Government should change and if the recent occupy movements serve as a wake-up call to do that, all for the better. Though experience does not make me very optimistic on that front.

If there is anything we shouldn’t do in the Netherlands, it is to pretend that things here are as bad as in the US or anywhere in Europe. We have the lowest unemployment in the Eurozone. We have an egalitarian society, cheap education, social security and mobility. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous and self-serving. You can do pretty much everything you want in this country and I say that not being white, not being privileged. I sincerely believe all it takes is for you to get out and make something. So do it.

  1. A horrible term, but the one we got to work with. []

Week 236

Monday

@polledemaagt An account manager is the clearest sign that you are paying too much. —@alper

Thinking of stuff to do while in Berlin and underemployed (in the beginning maybe).

Last week’s Pirate Party victory in Berlin where they got 10% of the vote should serve as a wake-up call to left-ish political parties that are paying lip service to the internet. There is a massive untapped populace who are completely disillusioned with the out of touch politics of today. GroenLinks and D’66’s only luck right now is that the Dutch Pirate Party is so incompetent for now.

And it seems that time travel maps are still popular while we still don’t have access to the data. Here’s a project being executed by my office mate Arjan Scherpenisse:
Timemaps

Skimmed this book by the Council for Social Development (RMO) about the public debate in the age of the internet:
As chief ideologue of Hack de Overheid I need to check these kind of publications for sanity.

Tuesday

Our friends at Two for Joy Coffee Roasters have opened their second store in Amsterdam. It’s a new favorite place to work and meet:
New Two for Joy next to my house

Kars put the slides for his dconstruct talk on the Transformers online. Well worth a read for a realistic view on the city and games.

Work on Apps voor Nederland and culiacan working at pace. I’m very proud of the community that is coming together.

Wednesday

I dropped by Ernst-Jan Pfauth and Ward Wijndelts who are settling in their new offices for their startup:
Project Human Filter Revolution Ping Pong

I concluded the day by chairing the jury deliberations for Apps for Noord-Holland. The day was concluded with the award ceremony and festivities.

Thursday

Finished reading The City & The City by China Miéville. A poignant book. The science-fiction book for this year. I read it on Readmill which is a pleasant enough reading experience but I don’t know yet if it will be the home of my future library.

Dropped by the great design team at Buro Pony in Rotterdam to discuss the future of the specialty design store: Dufarge.

Met with Christian Friedrich at Rotterdam’s new espresso bar Hopper.
Trying out the coffee of Rotterdam's finest

Caught up a bit on the Fyra back with Yuri van Geest. A pleasure as always.

Friday

Say what you will, the hipster life is a good one.

Friday was concluded in Utrecht with more writing and working at the Hubbub studio.

We had a great time playing The Resistance a mashup between Mastermind and Werewolf.

Playing The Resistance, there are spies among us!

Yes, that is the best we have found thusfar for a Microsoft Surface Table.

Catching up on the news of the week in die Zeit, here a profile of all the elected Pirates:
Almost all the newly elected pirates make software or studied sciences (i.e. politicians who can do mats)

Most of them have either studied sciences or work in IT (or both). Politicians who can do maths. That may be an actual solution to the economic crisis we are in.

And an editorial about the lack of responsibility in society both on the macro as in the microscale:
“nun sollen die anderen auch meine Schuld übernehmen.”

Week 234

On Monday I let go a bunch of stalling side projects which were not going anywhere.

Blogged about the Foursquare screen we made with a video which finally wrapped up that project (try to find a slot between 12:00 and 17:00 to make it to Leidseplein on a workday).

Interesting bit of news that TfL is implementing systems to prevent Oyster overcharging. This is where the transit card in the Netherlands is used as a way to surreptitiously draw money from unsuspecting travelers.

Found this random shirt design site: Zufallsshirt.de

Wrote a small review in Dutch of the theater experience De Club we went to last week. It aims to be an engine for social change instead of a traditional play, but in that respect it is somewhat lacking still. We are somewhat interested because this —creating systems that yield interesting experiences— is our work.

Tuesday I finally got to see this video from our visit to the fortress:

We are quite busy planning the next events for Hack de Overheid.

Wednesday was spent working in Utrecht and I got featured in an interview where I called out gamification for the bullshit it is at Virtueel Platform: “De keerzijde van gamification”

Thursday my profile got featured on The Next Speaker where you can now hire me to present at your event.

Amsterdam is also increasingly getting more machine readable:
Machine readable Amsterdam

We are also very glad with the funding of Venus Patrol a publication that we hope can shed a new light on the relation of games and culture.

I was present at the launch of a new Dutch Literature Magazine: Das Magazin (yes, German name…).

Toine launching das Magazin by talking about slurred hubris

Friday after breakfast with Dirk van Oosterbosch en Alexander Zeh, I helped out with painting the Open Cooperatie.

Open

Week 232 – extended

A new experiment, extended weeknotes combined with assorted reading and outtakes. I think this may be more fun for me to write and more fun for you to read.

Had a meeting for tlaquepaque to finalize the starting details of what is going to be an exciting roller coaster for Hack de Overheid. Also did some sketching on tlalnepantla.

The increased activity on Hack de Overheid also means that we will be working together more tightly and on location more often. The fact that we have a brilliant office space in the Open Coop in beautiful Amsterdam Noord does help.

Seating arrangement

Culiacan is moving forward steadily.

Met with Tessa from the Next Speaker and whipped my /about and /speaking pages into shape to be a bit more representative.

People talking about social change in the Netherlands. All that's missing are the tents.

We had Hack de Overheid drinks near the office for people that have made an app in one of our contests before and after that was dinner with Chris Taggart.

Hack de Overheid dinner and shelter from the rain

The friendly people from DUS architects that we are sharing an office with won the most important Amsterdam art award and held a party to celebrate:
DUS just made a killing party

And then finally on Saturday we celebrated Apps for Noord Holland or we could better say: ‘Apps on a Fortress’. It was a great event on a superb location with a full roster of people present. Solid progress was made on hacking civic applications and we are curious to see what the final entries in the contest will be.

New ideas need old buildings. —Jane Jacobs #apps4nh

I made two small sketches for Monster Swell visualizing some of the released data sets and chaired the demos of the days hacks.

A visualization of vacant office spaces in and around Amsterdam:
NDW measurements files we got (this is a very obtuse goldmine):
NDW Location Sketch

Elsewhere on the internet:

Talking about app contests, I came upon this old piece by Andy Oram about the sustainability of app contests: “App outreach and sustainability” to which I wrote a reply “Hackathons as gateways to more and better open data” without knowing that it had already been replied to at Radar by Alex Howard: “Everybody jumped on the app contest bandwagon. Now what?”

The same issue was touched upon here in Londen as well. People are wondering what sustainable results have ever resulted from a hackday/unconference other than some incidental learning. The learning itself may already be a good thing, but the expectations that are raised are somewhat higher. There are at least movements going to merge several initiatives to try to get at least some programmers working together with designers and product manager type people to create a viable offering. On the other hand we are working with Hack de Overheid to persuade government to be more open to adopting these initiatives.

The issues of gentrification and how a city’s development can work to stifle itself was touched upon in several pieces last week. The Times article “Revelers See a Dimming in a Capital’s Night Life” tells how the nightlife of Paris is being banished by its new affluent class of complainers. A similar movement is going on in Amsterdam now again under the moniker ‘Jordaanoproer’ where people who have bought dearly into one of the city’s most expensive neighborhoods expect some peace and quiet at night (to little avail). And there’s a story in Taz “Das Leben ist kein Ponyschlecken!” that counterbalances the current gentrification panic by calling the people writing those stories ‘hormone guided journalist moms and dads who want to raise their children in a Bullerby idyll.’ A large city will inevitable have some rough edges that should not be exaggerated (and Berlin is producing some nice stuff).

Adam Greenfield wrote the great: ‘Perilous asymmetries: Playing with trust in the “smart city”’ which is well worth reading:

Our wager with Farevalue is that a relatively minuscule informational intervention — amounting to a single line of copy, presented in the right voice, in the right place and time — has disproportionate power to transform our encounters with the pervasive networked infrastructure that now undergirds so much of urban life.

I saw the new movie by Nuri Bilge Ceylan: “Once upon a time in Anatolia”and wrote a small review about it.

Ian Bogost writes an interesting reflection on the digital humanities: Beyond the Elbow-patched Playground part 1: The Humanities in Public:

Humanist intellectuals like to think of themselves as secular saviors working tirelessly in the shadows. But too often, they’re just vampires who can’t remember the warmth of daylight.

And part 2: The Digital Humanities:

The digital humanities must decide if they are potting their digital plants in order to prettify the office, or to nurture saplings for later transfer into the great outdoors. Out there, in the messy, humid world of people and machines, it’s better to cast off elbow patches for shirt-sleeves.

Bogost’s thinking is I think also highly applicable to the Dutch culture scenes and recent protests against the cutbacks. As with the humanists all too often you get a sense that they bear active disdain for their audiences or the general public and that they are far too little oriented towards the public and active participation in the world:

The humanities should orient toward the world at large, toward things of all kinds and at all scales. The subject matter for the humanities is not just the letters and arts themselves, but every other worldly practice as well. Any humanistic discipline can orient itself toward the world fruitfully, but most choose to orient inward instead, toward themselves only.

Just like Bogost says that humanists should be private educators and public spies, the arts should be critics of the human condition both in the small and in the large. To do that, they need to be a bit more relevant and inclusive than they have been thusfar. Both pieces are well worth reading and its staggering how far the analogy keeps.

The article about plastic surgery in Brazil is not to be missed: “A ‘Necessary Vanity’”:

This notion of a right points to a potential problem with rights during a period when consumers are becoming a more powerful political force. When a good life is defined through the ability to buy goods then rights may be reinterpreted to mean not equality before the law, but equality in the market.

It’s interesting to see how in the run-up to hurricane Irene the NYC government’s site buckled but the office had enough web savvy to switch to proven scalable websites such as Dropbox and Facebook to be able to continue spreading disaster information to the general public. Government should have its information services in order but being able to switch flexibly in the face of adversity is definitely a bonus.

This API to the displays on Times Square is hugely exciting from an interactive displays point of view. If you want to learn how to program for such a thing, you could do worse than start off at the courses from Codecademy.com.

De Club (we do not talk about the club) is doing a run of performances these weeks in Amsterdam. I don’t know what it is about yet, but still I think you should go if you’re into gripping theatrical experiences.

Week 227

Monday I went off exploring a fort for an upcoming Hack de Overheid event. The industrial scenery and weather at the sea locks of IJmuiden was positively apocalyptic that day.

Away

The week was spent a bit catching up from a cold and ticking off stuff before a week of Berlin (staying at Your Neighbours) and a week of off the grid R&R in the Alps. So a frantic pace here and there.

Tuesday we went for a technical house call in the Hague:
Lattice work

Kilian wrote up his work on Statlas. Expect more on that after the Summer lull.

My presentation on CHI Sparks 2011 was put online (thanks Yohan Creemers) and quite pleased with how that turned out:

Chi Sparks 2011: Code 4 – A large scale game for organizational change from Chi Nederland on Vimeo.

There seems to be a VOLUME magazine out in which are incorporated our contributions about how architecture and the ‘internet of things’ should mesh. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but I’m curious as to the results.

James Burke and I made plans about the Chokepoint Project and an upcoming visit to the CCC Camp in Finowfurt.

A review I wrote for nrc.next about the documentary game: The Cat and the Coup (about the British/American coup d’état in Iran) saw print in a strongly reduced form. Expect a more elaborate version of that to hit Bashers in the next month.

I wrote a brief thing about how my ideas about Amsterdam urban development are supported by Jane Jacobs seminal work: “Jane Jacobs and the city of Amsterdam” and also wrote a small something over at Monster Swell to commemorate the 10e6 Foursquare users milestone and Amsterdam’s small role in that.

With all of that done, it was into the night train to Berlin for a Friday very early morning arrival.

Berlin am Morgen

Week 226

Last week a bunch of visual progress was made on culiacán. Expect an August release on that.

Also a longer version of my review of Inside a Star-filled Sky was posted to Bashers. Seemingly any post that does not contain meta-criticism has a hard time attracting comments over there (maybe everywhere). More stuff was published also about Jason Rohrer, especially of note the Wired piece about Chain World.

Mid-week marked the first deployed iteration of guadalupe. If development on that goes the way we want it, expect private alpha invites to become available also in August.

End of the week we spent a bunch of time doing a submission to SxSWi to talk about the Heist Model. It’s an edgy philosophy and a fun way of working, which we look forward to expound in Austin accompanied by friends, margaritas and BBQ.

Friday there was Ball Invasion (with friends):
Ball Invasion with Alex and Peter

After which I managed to get stuck with a car and drive it up North to the Appsterdam HQ for the iOS Devcamp that was in progress.

iOS devcamp

The weekend was marked by rainy misery and a short piece of writing about open data becoming a normal practice of Amsterdam City-Center.

Week 223

Monday I did some support and then went off to the UvA to present on data journalism together with Stef.
Kijk de datajournalism boys shinen

Tuesday I was in Utrecht to work on the Code 4 presentation for CHI Sparks. Working at the garden again was a very enjoyable experience made more so by the unexpected visit of Christine who’s making forays into game design herself.

A lot of the rest of the week was occupied with testing and preparing Statlas for a launch this week, which it did, so you can check it out and read more about that in next week’s notes.

Mr. Morozov visited the Netherlands which made for an interesting night out along with a very unexpected meetup with Babak and Ulla.
Evgeny Morozov about the internet and freedom

My takeaway from Evgeny Morozov can be summarized in this tweet:

Conclusion of a night with @evgenymorozov: government meddling on the internet doesn’t do us any good and can only hurt us in the long run.

Government control of the internet’s technologies seldom nets anything and is usually implemented on the back of scare tactics about terrorism or child pornography. When things turn sour, the systems that were deployed can be used to a very great effect against the entire population without much effort. This means it is imperative to maintain a free and open internet to safeguard freedom.

Thursday it was off to Arnhem to present at the CHI Sparks conference. The place where all seriously academic HCI people get together to present their findings. I presented on a serious game we made with Hubbub in the Games and Play track. Thanks to the organization for giving us the stage and thanks for the kind support from friends in the audience. I hope our presentation was worth your while.

And that was that, like I said, this week is even more exciting and with the return of Kars from the Land of the Rising Sun, it promises to become a hot Summer.

Statlas, bèta versie

We zijn al een tijdje bezig met Statlas en het is de hoogste tijd dat een eerste versie het daglicht ziet om te laten zien wat voor iets tofs we hebben gemaakt en te horen wat jullie ervan vinden. Dus voor jullie ogen: Statlas

Statlas is een gereedschap voor iedereen die makkelijk kaarten wil kunnen maken, en verspreiden. Voor een verzameling regio’s kun je waarden invullen (cijfers, kleuren, labels) en er wordt dan een kaart gemaakt die je vervolgens kunt delen, embedden en afdrukken. Een persoonlijk kartografisch platform waar er al meerdere van zijn maar volgens ons nog niet één die zo makkelijk is in het gebruik als deze.

http://statlas.nl/

We hebben Statlas gemaakt naar aanleiding van experimenten vorig jaar om geografische gegevens op het internet weer te geven. Die ideeën maar dan generieker en simpeler (en bedoeld als gereedschap) hebben geculmineerd in Statlas. Dit past tegelijkertijd ook in de NoGIS trend om traditioneel moeilijke technologie zoals GIS te ontsluiten via het internet.

Verder praten we met Hack de Overheid geregeld over data-journalistiek, maar waar we steeds tegenaan lopen is dat er niet genoeg gereedschappen zijn waarmee journalisten en andere niet-techneuten uit de voeten kunnen. Wij zeggen dan telkens dat die gereedschappen er gaan komen maar de beste manier om dat voor elkaar te krijgen is uiteraard om ze zelf te bouwen.

Statlas is gebouwd met financiering van het Stimuleringsfonds voor de Pers, in samenwerking met Fluxility en Alexander Zeh en is uiteraard open source. Voor volledige credits, zie het colofon.

En verder

Deze versie voldoet aan alles wat je zou willen hebben van een simpel stuk gereedschap. We hebben natuurlijk allerlei ideeën om dit technisch voortreffelijker en functioneel spectaculairder te maken maar dit is het fundament. Laten we eerst maar zien welke van onze ideeën het contact met de werkelijkheid overleven en dan wordt vanzelf de richting voor verdere ontwikkeling duidelijk.

Wat er in ieder geval aan toegevoegd gaat worden zijn meer regio’s. Er zitten er nu een handjevol in en meer staan er gepland. Verzoeken voor nieuwe gebieden (het liefst met een idee ook waar we de geometrie kunnen vinden) maar ook andere ideeën, bugs enz. zijn welkom bij ons op Monster Swell.

A new vision of the public domain

Lifting choice quotes from the proceedings of the Berkman Hyperpublic event graciously compiled by Ethan Zuckerman.

Here about privacy and how it should be a forward thinking discipline instead of a reactionary one:

“I don’t like privacy. It tends to be too closely associated with fear, and it always seems like a rear-guard action against technology.”Instead, we should work on the architecture of the public space and ensuring we architect for private space. —Charlie Nesson and a new vision of the public domain

Throwing my chips in with the reality based crowd

Seeing this presentation in Amsterdam as the culmination of Mobile Monday, was something great. The far reaching vision and reality based optimism Kevin Slavin lays down (his comments) are something we should aspire to. It is worth watching and watching again.

Some choice quotes, though we should just hope that he finishes that essay:

Reality is augmented not when it looks different but when it feels different.

Maybe the aspiration to 3D optical AR starts to feel a little bit like pornography. Like a thin veneer of the actual experience that is flattened for the eye, that’s rendered for the eye which is the one sense most easily fooled to begin with.

Nobody knew better than me and the other people in that room that this was just computer code but it felt like a spirit had moved through the room and knocked all these phones off the table.

For pilots there is no reality except the one right in front of them.

Singular focus in which the eye is looking at rather than around. It diminishes reality. It closes it down. Because as it turns out for the driver as for most everybody here, reality is understood to be the whole world around us, not just that thing in front of us.

They’re inventing new ways to see, rather than new things to look at. And rather than inventing new places to go, they are inventing kind of new ways to travel. Because the whole thing is there’s no shortage of stuff in the world and things to see and enjoy. Reality is plenty, thanks.

Notes about Thoughts on Interaction Design by John Kolko

We read Thoughts on Interaction Design 2nd edition as the fifth book for the UX Book Club Amsterdam and reviewed it yesterday. Here are my noteworthy passages from the book, which is not without its issues, but it does give a credible philosophical foundation for our practice.

p.34 A mature designer respects and embraces the often ill-structured nature of the process and —because he knows to expect messiness during the act of creation— he promptly forgets about it completely. Process becomes innate, and the phenomenon of design intuition takes over.

p.37 This view might be informed by an understanding of culture, or an intricate care and love of society.

p.55 When viewed under the guise of language, these products become the fabric of society and allow people to express themselves, to communicate with others, and tho shape their environment in unique ways.

p.57 designers must both realize and control the rhetoric of their designs.

p.72 Some have become wise to the farce, and no amount of decoration can lure these consumers into the trap. They select only handcrafted objects of beauty, and they’ve learned to judge good design and honest labor.

p.73 Consider, then, that designers can focus on supporting authentic human experiences with their work in a less forceful, controlling manner. Rather than striving to control every aspect of a time-based set of interactions, and rather tan attempting to shepherd people through a contrived set of experience gates, designers can support the authenticity that occurs naturally in life by producing incomplete or partially produced design artifacts.

p.77 A poetic interaction can generally be characterized as having or encouraging, three main elements: honesty, mindfulness, and a vivid refined attention to sensory detail.

p.83 Yet if designers focus only on the low-hanging fruit of functionalism or usability, the human experience with designed objects is destined to a level of banality.

p.88 The pursuit of a creative solution is not an easy activity, yet the difficulty —the sense of accomplishment that occurs when completing a difficult task— can be thought of as one of the main attractors to participants in the design process.

p.88 There is more to life than usability.

Fitbit lost and findings

I lost my Fitbit today. This was bound to happen and I’m surprised I managed to hold on to it as long as I did. So one minute I was getting off the tram and the next I didn’t have it anymore.

Cyborgified

Some findings:

The fitbit as a hardware device is very well designed. It works, it’s polite and you don’t have to do anything really. It’s quite easy to get into a habit with it. The website has some glitches and takes a whiles to fully propagate updates here and there, but I have the feeling that’s improving. Everybody I show one wants to get one.

On a negative bent: the entire premise of the devise is offensively US-centric. Everybody here in the Netherlands is somewhat peeved that it does not ‘do’ biking. This is of course understandable when a device has the cultural assumption in it that you take your car to a mall, you plod through said mall and then get back into your car. For genuine global appeal these devices need to be more adaptable still.

Finally: my fitbit was already showing some tears in the plastic and it’s far too easy to lose. I’m too wrapped up in my day to day activities to ‘take care’ of yet another device. It’s all I can do to keep my iPhone in one piece as it is. Also it being so easy to lose or break, needing to get another one at $99 is too convenient a profit strategy. I think I’ll pass.

Week 217

Lots of writing last week. We submitted the maguro project as a practice report to the DiGRA conference. Also wrote a bit of damage control on the Apps for Amsterdam contest regarding the implications of a certain submission: “Dude! Where’s my car?” Decisions made border on the ludicrous and it falls upon us as Hack de Overheid to choose the side of sanity. Finally I punched out some meta-writing about the conundrums of writing (or trying to write) for larger audiences: “Why write about games?”

Real estate wise it looks like our space in the Volkskrantgebouw may double and we will be able to expand our own activities and invite in friends. That will be awesome and add greatly to the dynamic of the studio. Stay tuned!

Tuesday saw the long expected completion of the Dufarge web store, a favor to our kind friends —nay! design superheroes— over at Buro Pony. Quite pleased that we managed to pull that one off in the in between hours.

L'Equipe Esthetique

Wednesday we had a Foursquare meetup here in Amsterdam with Naveen of Foursquare fame and a bunch of local enthousiasts. Lots of ideas still to do cool stuff with Foursquare but not much time.

Roof terrace interview

Thursday we gave an interview about the upcoming Statlas launch due soon to be online over at our friends of the Stimuleringsfonds. After that it was an open night at many venues for Creative Amsterdam and I went on a tour d’Amsterdam with Edial and we hit: Grrr, Foam and steim among other venues.

Freak Bionic Hand

Also some robots, just for good measure:
The Metal Horde

Robot to monitor building collapse due to NZ subway

Week 214

A busy week, maguro got completely finished and delivered to client. Culiacan managed to overcome the horrible Media Temple hurdle.

Nice place to work today

I spent a day working on potosi on site at de Groene Amsterdammer at their swanky new pad on the Singel which went live that very same day.

Office on Singel: WANT

De Groene Amsterdammer

Merida went into its final sprint and is almost ready for prime time.

Also talks about studio++ began to coalesce and the real estate search is about to start in earnest as soon as I tie up the last loose ends of my own move.

Blogged one piece about the open data victory over the Dutch Railways: “Dutch Train Times are open”

Also posted my obligatory iPhone trail of the past half year:
US visits not tracked?

Week 213

The weekly bit of media consisted of a brief Radio 1 excerpt about the issue of new anti-piracy legislation. This is of course futile and I did my best to explain such in a couple of minutes and a blogpost.

AD scoop: “Hip verjaagt fout volk”

Then did some setup work on culiacan. The rest of the week was filled with notable progress on Statlas and the rounding up and finishing of maguro.

Also inbetween all of this, I painted a room and moved house. Notifications of the new address and inaugural drinks forthcoming.

A home is a machine for living (in progress)

Week 212

Coworking Table

There is a vibe floating around at the office about studio++. I have had lots of ideas, visions, hopes and ambitions for the future studio, but most importantly: it should be similarly (de)central, be about twice as big and we should have a full kitchen to our disposal. Too much to ask for in Amsterdam’s slumping professional real estate market? I think not. The search starts in earnest sometime after I move house this weekend.

Karel

Finalizing maguro, doing onsite work with Kilian Valkhof on Statlas, talking with old school publishers, putting the final touches on mérida.

Skype

And in between all of this, trying to produce some original writing on the subject of games.

Also I cannot stress how instrumental the lovely guys at the Village in Utrecht are for keeping us caffeinated (and by extension sanely productive):
The Village

Week 211

It looks like the past period of turbulent ascent is over and the plane is going to be level for a bit. That does not mean that there isn’t an awful lot of awesome stuff on deck waiting to be published nor that there aren’t a bunch of new prospects on the horizon. More on those in due time.

Lots of work this week on Statlas also a bunch for the Groene Amsterdammer. Maguro got finished with a large scale finale event which they tell me was all the rage. Also our work on acapulco got finished, pictures for which are due soon.

Visited Mobile Monday. Prepared various proposals to do work on the border between computer science and architecture.

Also our friends from the Village in Utrecht opened their coffee store. Needless to say a lot of the work we do over there is fueled by quality caffeine and we will be paying them more than regular visits. I suggest you do the same.

The Village Proprietor

Friday we of course also had our regular drinks at @ouroffice. You are welcome for any of our next installations.

The new haul: Huizinga, Bogost, Jacobs Kolko

And as if the week was not filled enough with highlights, I also got to play my role as the Design Misanthrope:
Those that know me, know I'm very much the design misanthrope.

Colour

photo.PNG

I so wish that the icons in the app made more sense and that the flow between states was clearer, but my wishes really don’t matter that much.

Color has flow. You can just keep doing stuff and you go fluidly from one screen to the other even though it may not be clear what every screen is for or why the various elements on the screens are where they are. You can do a lot, it all moves and feels rather magical. It’s more like a game than anything else.

Better yet, the spatial dislocation forces you not to be anal about organizing or sharing or any of the other features photo sharing apps would normally bother you with (and force you to learn). Indeed that is the promise they make: don’t find/add your friends, don’t organize your pictures, just snap away as you will and Colour will take care of all the rest.

This is smart, gutsy, well executed, it promises to Not Make Me Think and I’m almost ready to let go. Almost.

Week 209

Last week Monday we saw the final work presentations at the Willem de Kooning Academy. It was a great experience and I was really blown away by the breadth of some of the work presented. Nevertheless it remains a challenge to fit a full data visualization curriculum within the course of 4 weeks. Given the time we had I am very proud of the progress made.

Flat white and calamity Jane

I met an old friend from Delft to talk about aiding him in his architectural PhD doing information architecture and visualization of the concepts in his research. This looks like a great opportunity to bring into practice my thinking and engagement in the field of architecture.

WNL Avondspits Radio 1

Finally, I rushed over to the TMG building to give an interview for Dutch Radio 1 during WNL’s Avondspits show. I ripped and uploaded the interview (in Dutch) to Soundcloud. You can listen to it below:
WNL Avondspits – Hack de Overheid by alper

Those that know me may be surprised by my parliamentary tone (which is a discipline that comes in handy from time to time).

I also put the last touches to the article on Hack de Overheid recapping our event and its success.

Maguro is running strong during its pilot, though small inbalances forced us to do some run-time tweaks. All in a day’s work.

Fuck yeah bavarois

Wednesday, I made my way out to Ermelo to give a workshop for the journalists of the regional broadcasting corporations, the ROOS-dagen. My subject matter —data journalism and visualization— is rather edgy for this crowd which was visible in the turnout. Those few who are willing to run with it, may find though that at the local and hyperlocal levels, a little data goes a long way.

Workshopping for Hack de Overheid

Made it back just in time to congratulate Alexander Klöpping on the book he wrote “Wikileaks: Alles wat je niet mocht weten”.

Blurry burger dinner

Thursday we celebrated our friends’ achievement in organizing the tenth This Happened Utrecht. Organizing ten editions of any event is a feat in and of itself, organizing ten This Happened Utrecht events to the consistent high quality standard of curation, facilitation and audience that Kars, Alexander and Ianus have, is nothing less than formidable.

Through Kars’s curation there are also a number of very nice interactive installations on display to play with on the Neude square for the Tweetakt theatre festival. I encourage you to drop by (free!) and try them out.

Eet keet

Worked a bit more on acapulco, some projects should receive more attention (and this one certainly will). Frideay we also received our soon to be new office mate Joris Machielse.

Statlas is running up to its first public release. Very soon now.

Week 207

Maguro got its next test and nicely stood up to everything thrown at it.

Designers design

‘PvdA — Altijd in de buurt’ (hermosillo) was put live just before the elections and was announced here and there.

I got called an ‘open data goeroe’ by the VPRO on their hackday report, which I don’t know what to think about.

Japanese Robata! - Kampaii!!!

The rest of the week was spent finalizing maguro functionally and Friday I briefly visited the Infographics congress which was ahem revealing in all its traditional glory. Let’s keep it at that.

Best of show (for me)

A more messy city

We spent last weekend having a veritable blast at the Cognitive Cities conference. It was a great spectacle of familiar faces, a nicely curated program and full frontal confrontations with the city of Berlin.

I cannot stress enough how much I enjoyed Cognitive Cities. It was crammed with beautifully designed views onto the city and a chance to catchup with old friends from all over Europe. The Copenhagen crew were present, Rebooters came back from withdrawal and we could congratulate Your Neighbours and Third Wave with their tremendous success in organizing such a conference.

But in the abstraction a lot of the reality was lost, I’m afraid. We are all of course striving to make our ghost boxes better but design cannot be a sterile, clean handed affair. Kars writes a fuller more balanced recounting of the conference, but my feelings are the same.

Urban computing at its finest

Walking around in the real cognitive city of Berlin and seeing the street kids in Neukölln and the party-goers in Berghain, I feel they are not within the myopic view of our design chique clique nor we in theirs. The street is a very messy and creative affair and it must not be disconnected from our digital cognition of it. At least not if we want to have any relevance and create real meaning for a significant number of people.

Ideas how to do this in quality and at scale are forthcoming, but like everything it should of course start with awareness.

Game Over

Week 206

Busily so briefly.

Pong

Monday as a fixture was the third session of my course over at WdeKA concerning itself with the basics of information and visualisation design.

Super Julius

Statlas development kicked into gear.

Het begint ergens op te lijken.

The rest of the week was spent working on hermosillo and maguro. The first was launched as http://www.pvda-altijdindebuurt.nl just before the elections of yesterday as the first version of an electoral monitoring platform. A full write-up on which is forthcoming at Monster Swell.

Cognitive Cities - Ben Hammersley opening

Then with everything done it was off to Berlin with partners in crime Kars Alfrink and Alexander Zeh for a weekend of Cognitive Cities and leveling up our skills at that particular city. The conference was ace as was the weekend.

Week 204

Drive by-ing these notes two three four days late. Yeah, these are those kind of weeks.

Gave my first lecture on data visualization at the Willem de Kooning. That was fun.

Then after I went straight to This Happened Utrecht #9.

This Happened Utrecht - Let's design

Met with the people behind IAmsterdam and updated on Statlas with Kilian Valkhof.

Going for the petit déjeuner (or the full French breakfast)

Found this permalink:
Vimeo Sharing feature

Finalized the rules for maguro and codified them.

Lunchy bunch

Spent a day at Buro Pony working on a very aesthetic affair.

Pony

After that it’s mostly a blur of hustling at maguro. Staying in at the studio ’till midnight day after day. Hard hours but good work and company. So no biggie.

Bandjesland Merlot, thanks @monobanda

Resultat

Quoting Jack Schulze: “It’s brilliant to have these people around.”

Professor Scheiber in optima forma

Harder dan gisteren

And finally the version was finished and we went off boozing.

In the weekend it was mostly doing catchup on other projects. Did the briefing and wireframes for hermosillo. Updated the event page for March 12th’s Hack de Overheid.

Then closed off the day with an architectural dinner.

Bucky

Touched up some stuff on Sunday and prepared my WdKA lecture of the following day.

Transmobility ARG

Heading out to the App in a Day event by Hack de Overheid and the VPRO yesterday morning, I was confronted by a rather complex series of actions I needed to do to get an OV-fiets.

Train station Maarssen is such a marginal place that the entire OV-fiets check-out/in process has been automated.

My first block was at the key locker where after holding your OV-chipcard to the RFID point below, you have to enter your OV-fiets code (which is a barcode + number on the backside) and then your PIN.

I had forgotten my PIN, so an alternative option was provided to call a number where with an automated response after entering my OV-fiets code I was read out my PIN. Having obtained the PIN, I could then get a key (video of the reverse process of returning a key to the automated locker below).

photo.JPG

After that the next step was getting through the dual human/bicycle gate. The bike has the be placed with its wheels in the cranny.

Dual Gate

The RFID key chain has an automatic extension cord so you can touch it to the RFID point on this terminal. This terminal doubles as a payment point for people who store their own bikes in this storage area.

Access Point

Then returning a similar procedure enables you to put your key back in the locker and nicely also indicate whether the bicycle is still in good order or not after which the locker flashes red and closes.

All in all a somewhat confusing but very doable process that felt like I was participating in an Alternate Reality Game (telephone numbers, secret codes, rush etc.).

Most people using OV-fiets currently are very well intentioned, but the systems look fairly foolproof and it remains to be seen how it holds up under wider exposure.

Week 203

Work

Made a lot of progress on Statlas during the course of the week. The domain should be live this week and we should see tangible results this month.

Maguro got updated and deployed again.

Planned the ineraction and design for acapulco and briefed designer Martijn Broekman. Finally finished those wireframes in a café in Brussels and sent them in.

Made a tentative start on hermosillo.

Mony dropped by for a crash course in Django and he promptly ported his entire Layar project TUdarover.

We setup a Github organization for Hack de Overheid to get the code conversation flowing before the event and give our code a place to live after. Also got a ton of communication things done for the event on March 12th.

Teaching

I also had a meeting to draft the road map for the small minor in data visualization I will be giving at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam. Also I prepared the first lesson during the weekend (lesson day: Monday).

Writing

Got my review of “Zero History” by William Gibson published on de Republiek der Letteren (the Republic of Literature). I had spent quite some time writing and polishing it and I was quite pleased with having it published.

That also went into print that same Thursday, so yeah pretty cool:
@GreatDismal review in VN

I also published my review of the iPad episode “Money & Speed”of the Tegenlicht documentary I got a preview of.

Start

The site for the Apps for Amsterdam application contest went live. Thanks to the Waag Society for putting that online so quick. We of Hack de Overheid are going to work with them to make it one hell of an open data wave this year.

Events

I attended Mobile Monday mainly to see Ville Vesterinen present about their pervasive magic game Shadow Cities.

Mobile Monday Amsterdam

On Saturday I made a quick trip to Brussels to attend FOSDEM which I had never attended before. It was a fun chance to sit in the DataDevroom and watch presentations about open source data processing and graph visualizations. It was good to meet fabricator Rejon again too (who I had last said goodbye to in Damascus).
What I noticed though at FOSDEM was the nearly complete absence of web development and assorted technologies. Also that while you cannot go to a technology conference these days without being hit by ethics and politics, that engagement was strangely absent at FOSDEM (except probably in the keynote by Eben Moglen).

Holy crapzor batman!

Hardware

FOSDEM Data Devroom is filled to capacity #bigdata

I also registered for the Infographics congress on March 4th though I find the focus on print media and infographics archaic and distasteful. Let’s see if we can change that.

Hardware

Got myself an iPhone4 because the old 3G wasn’t pulling it anymore after the countless iOS upgrades it had seen.

Velocity++

Also got an iPad keyboard dock from the bargain bin. Thanks Maarten den Braber for picking that up for me. Seems I have turned into that Apple completionist:
Double keyboarding

Week 197

Got some reinforcements at the office:
Reinforcements have arrived

My business cards for Monster Swell have also arrived, more about those in a separate post: Information Compression on Paper
Checking out Alper's hella sweet Monsterswell cards designed by BUROPONY

Started writing a document describing the end of life of TipiT for our investors. Nothing new there but still interesting to reflect.

Took in Dutchstats and starting planning that in earnest. Subsequently spent most of the day in Numbers. The phrase: “Project management is hard, let’s go shopping.”did come to mind…

I had been increasingly frustrated with Dutch media’s treatment of the Wikileaks affaire but also was somewhat too busy to write anything better. Inbetween business Jaap and I posted a ‘drive-by essay’ on a week old nrc.next blog post.

Wednesday was a kickoff on prototyping for Maguro which needs to leave the ephemeral stage sometime quick. That night there also was a very well curated Ignite at Mediamatic about games. Fifteen presentations is a bit on the long side, but none were really boring or bad due to the Utrecht gaming scene having come out in force.

The rest of the week was filled with more of the same and tying up loose ends for the end of the year.

Our office also said farewell to one of its members, typographic hero Gustavo:
Gustavo under the new Sutro filter
A new addition is already eager to get started in the new year.

Week 196

Last week was mired by the flu which made it a bad week for production (and only slightly less bad for meetings).

Some notable stuff did happen, however.

We kicked off project Maguro which is going to cause our all star team a lot of work —and a lot of fun— in the new year (see Kars’s Week 182).

Marathonmeeting

Tuesday night we had the fourth UX Book Club Amsterdam discussing the book Game Design Workshop. eBuddy hosted us and it was a lot of fun both talking about game design, how it pertains to interaction design and reminiscing about old games.

Wednesday Urbanode was launched officially, my write-up: Urbanode: first steps in environmental control

Friday I met as part of a delegation by Hack de Overheid with people from the city of Amsterdam and the Waag. Lots of stuff going to happen with regards to open data and apps in Amsterdam in 2011.

Urbanode: first steps in environmental control


Urbanode running from an Android Phone from VURB on Vimeo. The movie shows an Android phone controlling the stagelights at the Melkweg using a colour picker on a webpage.

I’m quite proud to have been part of the local systems integration crew of Urbanode with the steps we made on controlling environments using web technology. The movie above shows my laptop connected to a lighting panel in the Melkweg running an OLAD (Open Lighting Architecture) server talking ARTNET/DMX to talk with the panel and the urbsville NodeJS application that exposes the available lights as an interface on a webpage for the Android phone.

So the flow is as follows:

  • Android phone (or other), goes to a webpage on the local network
  • The webpage is served by urbsville using NodeJS which means everything is live and can be kept consistent across clients
  • Any device setting is mirrored using an internal mapping by updating the DMX values of the corresponding device on the ARTNET output
  • OLAD sends its current state to the lighting panel
  • The lighting panel updates (merges) the values into its universe and when they are hooked up the lights change their behaviour —or colour in this case— accordingly.

So starting with colours and intensities of lights, the next step is being able to hookup arbitrary properties of any kind of device and making it all work solidly so application developers, lighting specialists and game designers can get ahold of this technology.

A lot of this is still quite abstract and the technology setup is pretty cutting edge but this is an essential building block for moving forward. Being able to control physical devices using Javascript has already been possible as has service discovery in spaces (tons of demos by Philips, Sun and the likes). Urbanode breaks out of the local application cul-de-sac and exposes everything straight to the web using the web’s most native control language: Javascript. This is a big step in totally commoditizing device control and normalizing and expanding the scale of operation.

This has been blogged about already by the Urbanode team “Prototypes for discoverable services in public space”, “Alpha Release: Urbanode” and picked up by Bruce Sterling on Wired. I would encourage you to go to github and clone the code and tell us what you think.

Weeknotes 194

Strategic Plan

Monday

Work on PLAY Pilots and preparations for Urbanode (actually all week long). Some development on aguascalientes.

Tuesday

Meeting with Amsterdams UITbureau. They are doing some very cool things to promote the city.

Got the business card comps by Bureau Pony which are going to be utterly smashing.

Did a big Urbanode test with James and Peter. Got everything back up and running and talking with each other. Also got the mobile version to work with something of a workaround.

Then worked deep into the night for a release of querétaro.

Wednesday

Did a demo of Urbanode for Kennisland at Melkweg with everything working at base level. An incredible refutation of Murhpy’s Law.

Then went out to a strategic dinner with Hubbub after congratulating Sjoerd Wennekes with his MBA (!).

Lit Menu

I could use some interns for Monster Swell. There’s more than enough work to be done in programming, cartography, journalism, writing, design and assorted. If you think you qualify for an internship send me a sample of your solid work and have your people contact my people.

Thursday

Coffee with Johnny Wonder. A bunch more work on PLAY Pilots: Bandjesland and preparations for presenting at Open Innovation Festival.

Friday

Gave my presentation for Open Innovation Festival at the plenary meeting room in City Hall. That was fun.

Nice venue to present at

Had lunch with front-end superstar Kilian Valkhof with some more than decent coffee.

Syphon Coffee

End of the afternoon I gave a brown bag presentation at Adaptive Path Amsterdam. It was a more informal and updated version of my Civic Duty in a Hyper-Connected World.

Saturday

Saturday we had Open Data Day at @ouroffice. Turnout was not that large due to a snow storm and Sinterklaas, but we did an in-depth analysis of a soon to be opened dataset.

Open Data Day

The rest of the weekend I played around with installing OpenCV but could not manage to get the python bindings to install on my OS X so I gave up on that1, the Java Processing library also flaked out.

  1. I’ve spent more than enough time in my life chasing down C++ library and linkage errors. []

This Happened #8 – Sound Bytes

The quotable This Happened Utrecht #8.

Ianus

Then we will have those infamous drinks sponsored by Microsoft.

Helma

Five minutes later she forgot that it all happened and she was all nice to me.

Something that really makes these people happy is cake, because they think it’s somebody’s birthday or there’s a party.

Everybody is in a different timezone and they have difficulty connecting to each other.

They had the need but they couldn’t really interact with each other.

They should be able to show off to others what they can do.

There were people falling asleep and during our user test only one person fell asleep.

What you can provide is some fun during the day, that they’re not just sitting there and staring.

Even when the phone is ringing the caregiver has to direct them what to do.

The caretakers really like to have more control.

Rainer

The term generative has been used too broad lately.

Usually when you talk about generative methods, they result in visual complexity.

I could talk about my interest in noise for hours.

I always use random parameters and noise functions that transform my images.

After we got commissioned we found out that the opening of the room was in two weeks.

This emerged from the idea that we wanted to work with the architecture in the room.

At first sight it’s not clear what’s projected and what’s fixed.

Somehow it always resulted in noisy visuals.

I started to bring back the analog aesthetic.

Lotte

I was working in New York and I was mildly bored.

It wasn’t very attractive.

Let’s ask her to make a WordPress skin.

We just had all this content on the site and we needed a place to put it.

Aren’t there periods? They said: yeah there are periods.

Minor details but really part of the process of figuring out where you’re going.

I did all this in Illustrator because I didn’t know there were other tools to do this.

Wanted to find a visual way of dragging people in.

We want to provide an alternative to the really expensive art history books.

If you send out a survey you never get good answers.

We’re just five art historians and an information architect.

I know it gets more audience than the Boijmans website. And it gets less than MoMA.

Adriaan

It’s also my first keynote so I went a bit overboard with the transitions.

They really try to make the most of exposing themselves.

We decided to visit the location. This was very good.

Once you’re standing there and you see the area, you really see the potential of the area.

It would be really absurd.

There were all these connotations of playfulness from your childhood.

We modeled it using lego. It has nice affordances.

Here’s a man staring at something he built with his own hands.

It’s as if his face is about to break from smiling so hard.

We didn’t imagine that two people wanted to sit on the thing at the same time. Which was quite erotic actually.

Two girls one chick.

There were definitely people coming back for more.

On Twitter I was reading: I think I broke my arm. It’s quite a strenuous exercise.

Week 191

Last week was the first week that I was back from the Levant. I have notes for the three weeks in between, but I think I’ll skip those (though plenty of interesting stuff happened over there too).

Monday I presented an introduction on data for Mobile Monday, roundup post here: “The Rising Tide of Data on Mobile Monday”

Tuesday we picked up development of PLAY Pilots for the next live game: Bandjesland. And that night an open data proposal we helped author was adopted by Amsterdam, write-up: “Open Data in Amsterdam Center Adopted”

Wednesday and Thursday were spent doing roundup on data related issues (lots of stuff brewing) and further work on PLAY Pilots.

Friday I did a bit of consultancy for a next generation dating startup being spearheaded by three very nice friends.

And part of the weekend was spent preparing the presentation for Social Media Club Utrecht.

Tekst NRC.next-artikel openbaar vervoersgegevens

Stukjes schrijven zonder hyperlinks erin is gek, maar dat komt erbij kijken als het op krantenpapier gedrukt moet worden. In ieder geval is vandaag een stuk van mij gepubliceerd op de opinie-pagina van de nrc.next: “Dat moet toch beter kunnen? — Geef vervoersinformatie vrij.

In dat stuk betoog ik dat de gegevens van het openbaar vervoer vrij beschikbaar moeten zijn voor reizigers. Dit is onderdeel van een langer thema op dit blog en van een recente ontwikkeling voor open data in de breedste zin van het woord.

Hier de integrale tekst zoals ik hem heb opgestuurd (en die waarschijnlijk met kleine wijzigingen geplaatst is1) en nu mét links:

Ik wil een mobiele telefoon die me precies vertelt wanneer ik weg moet voor mijn volgende afspraak, waar ik moet instappen, waar ik eruit moet en hoe ik daarna precies moet lopen of fietsen. In Japan bestaan dat soort systemen al terwijl we hier vaak niet eens weten wanneer de volgende tram komt. We kunnen dat hier ook maken als we bij de gegevens mochten. Die zitten alleen vast in één van de informatie-goudmijnen waar Alexander Klöpping het hier over had op 27 juli.

In Nederland hebben de openbaar vervoersbedrijven bedacht dat zij de informatie verzamelen bij 9292 en dat wat zij aanbieden goed genoeg is voor iedereen. Helaas is dat het niet. Op 9292ov.nl staat een site uit de jaren ’90 waar je zo goed en zo kwaad als het gaat een reis kunt plannen. Tegenwoordig hebben sommige vervoerders ook applicaties voor de iPhone. Die van 9292 is werkbaar en de NS heeft er nu ook eindelijk zelf eentje (maar het is de vraag of die het blijft doen als het gaat sneeuwen).

Maar wat als je dan geen iPhone hebt? Dat is precies het probleem. Doordat de vervoerders op de gegevens zitten en poortwachter spelen ben je overgeleverd aan wat hun platform-du-jour is. Heb je een telefoon die niet hip genoeg is of te alternatief, dan heb je pech gehad. Nu hoeven zij natuurlijk niet voor iedereen een applicatie maken, maar wij mogen dat dus ook niet zelf doen. Ze zeggen dan dat: ‘de gegevens van hen zijn’. Alleen vergeten ze dan dat zij er voor ons zijn en dat wij al twee keer hebben betaald voor die gegevens: via de belastingen en via ons kaartje.

Je mobiele telefoon is maar één plek waar deze gegevens handig zijn. De mogelijkheden zijn eindeloos maar we weten pas wat werkt als iedereen die een idee heeft dat uit kan proberen. Als we moeten wachten op de creativiteit van onze vervoerders, wachten we op een bus die nooit komt.

In Japan zijn ze ver hiermee, maar bijvoorbeeld in de VS zijn deze gegevens ook al open en in Londen heeft Transport for London pas alles vrijgegeven. Wat ze daar zien is dat er een grote groep techneuten zit te springen om ermee aan de slag te gaan. Volwaardige applicaties waar wij jaren op moeten wachten worden daar binnen enkele dagen gelanceerd.

Zoals pas op een Science Hack Day —een dag waar techneuten en wetenschappers samenwerken— in Londen waar door een paar mensen een live metrokaart werd gemaakt met de posities van alle treinen. Verder is daar net een fietsen-leensysteem (de Boris Bikes) gelanceerd met nu al meerdere concurrerende mobiele applicaties waarop je kunt zien waar je fietsen kunt huren. Dit gaat verder dan je telefoon: mensen bouwen horloges met daarop live vertrektijden van haltes in de buurt, gratis SMS- en telefoondiensten en een Augmented Reality-weergave van metrolijnen bestaat ook al. Alleen niet in Nederland…

De vervoerders hoeven dus alleen maar hun gegevens vrij te geven, ontwikkelaars bouwen dan voor geld, prestige of plezier en de reiziger wint, want hij krijgt de keuze uit meer en betere applicaties.

Nu is onze overheid wel traag maar ook niet helemaal achterlijk. Er komt over een paar jaar —riant laat— een Nationaal Datawarehouse Openbaar Vervoer (NDOV) waar alle gegevens in moeten. De aanbesteding start binnenkort maar daar moeten een paar harde eisen bij als we mee willen kunnen met de rest van de wereld.

1. Alle gegevens in het NDOV wat betreft plannen, actuele locaties, vertrektijden en storingen moeten leesbaar zijn voor mensen (via een website) en voor computers (via een API). 2. De gegevens moeten voor iedereen vrij beschikbaar zijn zonder beperkingen. En 3. er moet altijd een basisplanner aangeboden worden die van hoge kwaliteit is, maar daarnaast en daarbovenop moeten anderen kunnen innoveren.

Nederland slibt dicht en de visie op mobiliteit zoals in de troonrede verwoord gaat niet verder dan meer en meer asfalt. Daartegenover staat de hard-core vouwfietsbrigade maar het hoeft niet zo zwart-wit. Met de juiste informatie op het juiste moment kun je de best mogelijke keuze maken, of dat nu het OV is, de fiets, de auto of een combinatie daarvan.

Goede informatie kan ons helpen om één vervoersnet te maken waarbinnen je zorgeloos reist. Denk aan het geweldige gevoel als je de trein en je aansluitingen haalt en wél op tijd bent. Dat kan vaker en makkelijker. Openbaar vervoer wordt misschien nooit een feest, maar het kan wel een stuk minder beroerd —en misschien zelfs leuk!— worden.

Gepubliceerd worden in de krant is natuurlijk fijn, maar ik hoop vooral dat dit stuk iets wordt om dit verhaal mee verder te krijgen en om bij de mensen op de juiste plek het inzicht verder te helpen.

Bedankt in ieder geval Alexander Klöpping voor de aanleiding en Reinier Kist en Antoinette Brummelink voor de feedback.

Hier ook een foto van het stuk.

  1. Ik zit in het buitenland, dus ik heb het stuk zelf nog niet in de krant gelezen. []

Design Mind Salon – The Quotable Buxton

Last week I attended the Design Mind Salon with Bill Buxton (our hero) as one of its speakers. I managed to jot down some quotes by him. All of these are paraphrases but they’re good ones:

Great design does not come from a great designer or a great department. It comes from a culture.

Mos people who talk about the importance of design do not know who makes the design decisions. Most people who are making design decisions do not know they are doing so, or have the competence to do so.

If you cannot toss your ideas out, you will go nowhere.

Agility of mind and humor to come to great solutions. Play is fundamental to creative thinking and design.

To go from invention to maturity (billion dollar industry) takes 20 years on average. You don’t have to predict the future, you just need to know the last ten years.

The ideas are lying right in front of us. They are waiting to be picked up by people who see them. We need people who serve as a Geiger counter.

Think of a musician, cinematographer, artist who does not know the history of their discipline. Now find a designer.

The only way to engineer the future tomorrow is to live in it yesterday.

Smart home already exists in cars. People don’t think about this as architecture.

They see the world through different eyes and in different ways. Because they are trained to do so and they try really hard at it.

If you do not have the broadest base of experience to bing to the question, why do you expect to be better than the competition?

The Renaissance man is dead long live the Renaissance organization.

Competent designers have theory and technique not only vision. You don’t need inspiration. This is not art, this is business. Creativity can be learned and improved upon. You need to practice.

Fijne afscheep van de OV-fiets

Ik was benieuwd naar wat gegevens van de OV-fiets, dus ik klom in de pen:

Hallo,

Wij waren benieuwd naar aanleiding van dit WOB verzoek wat betreft fietsenverhuur in Londen.
hoe het zit met het gebruik van de OV-fiets in Nederland.

Wat zijn de gebruikscijfers van de ov-fiets wat betreft aantallen keren verhuurd per dag? Is het mogelijk om een bestand te krijgen met de huuracties per fietsstation waar en wanneer een fiets wordt uitgecheckt en waar en wanneer die fiets dan weer wordt teruggebracht?
Op die manier kunnen we vanuit journalistiek oogpunt interessante informatie winnen over bijvoorbeeld drukte per station en duur van huur per gebied etc. etc.

Graag ontvang ik van u een reactie via e-mail of telefonisch op dit verzoek.

Met vriendelijke groet,

En ik kreeg netjes een reactie terug van de mensen van OV-fiets die het dus duidelijk totaal niet gesnapt hebben:

Beste heer Çugun,

Bedankt voor uw bericht.
Alle info welke wij prijs geven aan particulieren zijn te vinden op onze website of op internet zelf.
Graag verwijs ik u dan ook naar de deze opties.

Hopend u hiermee voldoende te hebben geinformeerd.

M.v.g.
helpdesk OV-fiets

De WOB geldt geloof ik niet voor dit soor semi-overheid. Iets wat op zichzelf al verschrikkelijk is, maar deze mensen hebben ook geen flauw benul of sportiviteit. In Nederland zijn we outclassed en outgunned.

Week 187

A short remaindered weeknote (a rather awesome event and dinner packed week indeed):

Monday had dinner with our informal hedge fund association whose members shall stay anonymous. Suffice it to say: they’re a swell sort.

Finishing up my end of the Urbanode, the local systems integration and being the programmer on the ground. Handed that over to Peter Robinett on Friday.

Most of the rest of the week was concerned with preparing my presentation for the Club of Amsterdam on Thursday and then putting the slides with notes and references for that online.

Had a talk with D66 council member Sebastiaan Capel with ideas from my own practice and of the wider tech community on how to improve the state of the city of Amsterdam. I eagerly await his transcript of that talk.

Suit up!

Wednesday I was invited to the Microsoft Design Mind Salon with Bill Buxton, an awe inspiring design mind if ever there was one. After that I went to the drinks of the Design by Fire Event (a great event by all accounts) and caught up with friends old and new for dinner.

Bill Buxton

Thursday was the presentation day with speakers’ dinner. Had an interesting talk with Arjen Kamphuis of Gendo.

Ruysch

Friday I rounded up my administration before my trip to the Levant.

Packing

Eben Moglen — “Will the net empower the center or the ends?”

Bits of Freedom did a terrific job hosting a salon with Eben Moglen this afternoon at The Hub. As Mr. Moglen did, I am going to take the liberty of assuming you already know who he is1 and I’m going to proceed to write a biased view of the afternoon.

I love Bits of Freedom in its current incarnation to death —all its members are trerific people too— and I support their causes though I’m often vocally critical of certain approaches, ideas and dogmas of the privacy movement.

Everything taken into account though, BoF are our own stalwart bastion in the fight for digital freedom so I suggest you support them.

Anyway, to get going:

Many of the points raised today with regards to control, power and its properties, the interregnum moment we find ourselves in, xenofobia, databases, anonymity are highly pertinent to the current global political environment. Mr. Moglen is a gifted speaker with a broad legal and historical perspective which is awesome.

There are a bunch of issues that I find pertinent that seem not to be touched upon within the current movement and this piece is one way of getting them out into the open and out into the Google.

I managed to get one question in that got misinterpreted and had a lively debate afterwards with Mr. Moglen about the cultural cleft between designers and hackers.

Sticking in the mud

What is often a risk with the hacker/counter-cultural attitude to technology is that any protest you have against the current state of things can be interpreted as a plea to abolish said technology and go back to the prior state.

Mr. Moglen had some part in this with his plea against digital payment methods and contactless transit payment (de OV-chipkaart).

I know he wasn’t for abolishing these things, but the more extreme outliers in the privacy movement either want to or they want to cripple these systems with freedom to such an extent that they become unusable or their utility becomes compromised. Sometimes these point of views are porpagated with such a disconnect to the larger part of society that it borders on Luddism. I think that is a real risk.

What the privacy movement needs to do is to speak out clearly for the benefits of these technologies. I clearly see the value of the OV-chipkaart and any plea for rolling back the system back to the strippenkaart is ludicrous on a variety of levels. Even if the OV-chipkaart is as Mr. Moglen stated: a policeman in every tram.

The benefits and the need for technological and service innovation in society are clear and that is not where this battle should be fought.

The challenge should be: how to create these systems and in the meantime also safeguard our privacy and freedom. What legislation needs to be carried through in mandates and audits in such a way as to not compromise or hamstring the design and yield usable, pleasant and secure systems. That is a big challenge, but it is the only one.

User Experience

The track record of the free software movement when it comes to usability and consumer appeal over the past decades has not been stellar2. In netbooks and other devices adoption is increasing but the frontier has been moved on to mobile devices and on to closed (but tempting) app platforms.

Mr. Moglen talked about the freedom box which is going to be a plug which you can put in your complete personal computing surface which will store your media and backups, intermediate your necessary services, talk to your cell phone and federate with suitable social services. This is the vision.

From an experience point of view this is going to be a hell of a nut to crack. We already have best of breed applications that serve most of these ends3. These are already crystallized, have tremendously talented people working for them and have massive network effects. Building functional parity services is going to take a lot of time, these are probably not going to be as interesting, usable or seductive as their proprietary counterparts and in the meantime those will have moved the goalposts.

There may be a large opportunity for such a device in the developing world and free culture innovation out of China or Brazil could help improve such a thing massively, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

The broader problem is that both designers are not very keen to work on open source projects (though that is changing) and that open source projects are not very keen on design input. Yes, anybody can fork a project and build something ‘better’, but the division of effort is not useful while the division of labour within a project: programmer program, designer design, would be more welcome.

My discussion with Mr. Moglen served as a reminder how immense this cultural divide is and frankly I don’t think it is bridgeable in any traditional way4. It gets mired in assumptions on technology use, problems that need solving and a misunderstanding of what people (users) actually want and value in software.

So in short: freedom without usability does not amount to much. I consider myself rather well versed in these issues but I use Apple products and Facebook5. If all the knowledge within the movement cannot deter me, then 1. imagine the general public and 2. realize that it is not an education problem we are dealing with.

Public Space

So the free personal webserver is a great vision and a lofty goal, but mind that the goalposts are being moved once again and that before that project is done society may have changed under our feet.

I asked a question about this but that seemed to be so far from out field that it got misunderstood and turned into something about wireless net neutrality.

The issue is this: We have a rich set of rules and affordances governing access to and rights in public space and the built environment. With the wiring and virtualization of public space, how can we proactively codify similar rules for these new situations to create generally good outcomes?

What I meant by the wiring of public space is the fact that every object from lanterns and traffic lights to every brick and tile can and will have an internet connection (think Everyware). Construction companies and IBM are pitching this stuff on greenfield cities and systems already6. We in the old world are somewhat insulated from these developments due to sheer inertia, though we already have near perfect parking camera surveillance.

The virtualization of public space is nearing with the linking of real life and online be it conceptually or in full blown AR. Object and facial recognition, real-time image processing and filtering and differentation/personalization are going to have large scale effects. Imagine coupling this with ad supported carrier provided AR displays and things get really hairy really quickly.

I think this is going to have large scale repercussions7 and it would be good if the privacy movement had its eye on this ball as well (yes, there are many balls), however nascent it might seem at this moment.

Update: This discussion is exactly one touched upon by Zittrain in his “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It”:

But people do not buy PCs as insurance policies against appliances that limit their freedoms, even though PCs serve exactly this vital function. People buy them to perform certain tasks at the moment of acquisition. (Chapter 3)

  1. Otherwise you can read the Wikipedia page and 20+ years of Free Software literature. []
  2. These are the people that still can’t figure out how to connect a laptop to a beamer or build a workable FTP-client. []
  3. So if a friend of mine needed a backup made, would I tell them to buy and configure some arcane plug that goes into the wall or would I tell them to signup for Dropbox? Mind you Dropbox has a large and quite talented team of engineers and designers who have worked very hard to make that experience as seamless as it is. []
  4. These kind of discussions with free software people also quickly deteriorate into technological pissing contests. Though I may at times still be amused by those, your average user couldn’t care less about the intricacies. []
  5. You could argue that my knowledge of these systems gives me a more informed choice, which is only partially true. []
  6. For instance the new parking meter system in San Francisco. []
  7. I’m giving a talk on some of these developments this Thursday. []

Ontwerp en complexiteit als journalistieke kansen

De laatste dagen staan een beetje in het teken van gelekte e-mailtjes van, naar en door invloedrijke mensen in Nederland. Een van de recentere is die van de nieuwe hoofdredacteur van het NRC, Peter Vandermeersch, naar zijn redactie, hieronder (via):

Klik voor groter. Vandermeersch benoemt een serie dingen die de krant zou kunnen en moeten verbeteren om ‘het centrum van het politieke en intellectuele debat’ in Nederland te worden. Ik denk dat weinig mensen echt problemen zouden hebben met deze punten, veel ervan zijn nogal voor de hand liggend: sneller, beter, harder nieuws, geen primeurs laten afpakken, geen dingen laten liggen.

Wat ik vanuit Monster Swell wel interessant vond was zijn herhaaldelijke roep om twee dingen die in ons straatje liggen.

Helderder maken van ingewikkelde cijfers en kwesties

We zijn niet goed in cijfers

Hij geeft aan hoe het problematisch is om cijfers die in de krant staan voor de lezer te duiden op een manier dat het interessant is en dat mensen snappen wat het betekent. Journalisten die statistiek leuk vinden zijn er niet zo veel.

Hetzelfde met het punt over het pensioendebat:

We hebben het niet of heel weinig over de vraag hoe groot ons pensioen is, wat we nu moeten doen als dertigjarige, veertigjarige of vijftigjarige om straks een goed pensioen te hebben

Dit is een kwestie die bij meer mensen speelt die ik ken, maar daarnaast juist bij dit soort grote vormeloze maatschappelijke problemen zou een krant de verdieping en verduidelijking moeten brengen die iedereen mist. Dit kan visueel, of met een dossier of door een online supplement met interactieve rekentools en tie-ins met andere bedrijven.

Journalistiek is teveel een bastion van de alpha/gamma geweest maar in een complexer wordende wereld zijn er mensen nodig die wiskunde en statistiek kunnen gebruiken om complexe thema’s te identificeren, te analyseren en dat dan om kunnen zetten in een verhaal waarin ze dat alles uitleggen. Deze mensen moeten dan juist niet weggestopt worden in de wetenschapsbijlage. Wetenschap, techniek en ontwerp raken tegenwoordig elk facet van ons leven.

Datajournalistiek is daar één onderdeel van. Deze thema’s blijven terugkomen. Gegevens moeten verzameld worden en ontsloten als journalistiek gereedschap, soms voor een plaatje of kaartje in de krant, soms voor een online tool en soms misschien alleen als achtergrond bij een stuk tekst.

Daar heb je mensen nodig die een beetje van alles kunnen en een paar specialisten. Is dit een wensdroom? Valt dit te integreren in de dagelijkse praktijk van een krant of uit te voeren in tijdelijk dienstverband? Wij denken van wel en we willen graag uitzoeken hoe en wat.

Beter visueel ontwerp

We zijn niet creatief genoeg in onze aanpak en presentatie.

De roep om interessantere formats en betere en visuele presentatie van de concepten die in de krant komen. Met kaartjes, foto’s en over het geheel: beter ontwerp.

We creëren te weinig ingangen in onze stukken.

Het verhaal over die lichtbalk blijft een beetje vaag maar dit is ook weer een roep om een interessantere opmaak en formattering van stukken.

Niet precies in ons straatje, want Monster Swell doet zelf geen visueel ontwerp, maar we hebben een redelijk sterke mening over wat wel en wat niet goed/mooi is en we zoeken naar de beste grafische ontwerpers om mee samen te werken (in Nederland moet dat vooralsnog met een klein lampje).

Goed grafisch ontwerp begint met een sterk concept en een goede ordening van wat belangrijk is en wat niet (informatie-ontwerp). Dat doen we dan weer wel. Wat de rest betreft, stel ik voor dat ze @iA inhuren en de NRC deze eeuw in katapulteren.

Jurriaan van Stigt ARCAM lecture — “Solving these things in a simple and right way is fun. It is our work.”

Yesterday the next ARCAM lecture was held in the Brakke Grond by Jurriaan van Stigt of the firm LEVS.

Jurriaan van Stigt

Here again are my brief notes (quotes are paraphrases at best):

He shows a clip from the Godfather (‘He made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.’) to illustrate the split personality of architect. Partially analytical partially emotional. Also partially doing what is right and partially pandering.

Son of Joop van Stigt, would play at his father’s firm from a young age on

Was greatly disappointed by the architecture school in Delft. All his architecture heroes only were talking about right or wrong. There wasn’t room for dissenting thought. One librarian would still buy all the wrong books (eg. Richard Meier).

His teachers were technology averse because they said that would ruin the creativity.

Marianne, his now wife, graduated on a concept for Amsterdam Damrak to integrate progress within the old city.

He graduated with a plan for the Wibaut-/Weesperstraat similar to a plan that is only now being executed. He called it the most beautiful street in Amsterdam (It is now commonly called the ugliest. -AÇ).

Finally they added Adriaan to add even more 1+1=3 synergy to the office.

They started a firm and they wanted to have done entire projects from front to back including interior, direction and management to have a feel for how it all works.

Overview of the Work

He says they also do technical direction and management. The number of people is fluid, they focus on the projects (Compare what I wrote about modern agencies and Spry Fox recently. -AÇ).

Talks about critical regionalism by Kenneth Frampton, arhitecture should unify with cultural layering and without prejudice and dogma.

‘Al onze gebouwen beginnen met een verhaal dat gelinked is aan een plek en waarom het zinnig is om het daar te doen.’

‘Je moet altijd je rokje optillen als je als architect werkt wilt binnenhalen.’ (illustrated by Zomergasten Helmut Newton clip)

‘Architecten die bij een opdrachtgever een leuk plaatje doen en de dunheid van ons vak laten zien.’

Coins the term voodoo architects: voorlopig ontwerp, definitief ontwerp (preliminary design, definitive design)

Be curious, see it through, be engaged with an assignment, be best not in but for the world.

Don’t work with separate stakeholders but mix them all together and create a chemistry.

Densify

‘We have HAD a very rich tradition in managing our public space.’

It takes a tremendous amount of resourcefulness and asking and talking. You have to make sure the mix is right on all levels to be able to densify.

By waiting for everybody and not deciding you also decide. Proactivity is often necessary.

In the end we have a lot of fun to create a beautiful building.

Bouwfraude

How difficult it is to get rid of a contractor. The lowest one usually stays in the race with the price he quoted. You can’t legally see the quotes the others have made.

They managed to get rid of their contractor and tender it under the table. When they finally were allowed to open the envelopes with the other quotes, it turned out these were stuffed with newspapers.

Concept & Analysis

Craft

It takes a lot of energy to convince people that certain things are doable. It is fun to show them it is doable if you are confident it is.

You can’t have yourself be guided by the specialists who say they know it all.

Shows prototypes they made before constructing the building.

It demands a lot from the building parties. The right builders.

Of course it’s nice to build a cool tower, but we don’t want a cool tower for a cool tower’s sake.

We already have enough architects who create their own problems.

Solving these things in a simple and right way is fun. It is our work.

A great talk though it took some time to get started. Referencing the Godfather clip: Jurriaan van Stigt is pretty gangster. Many of the client issues he named are directly transferrable to for instance the web profession. Many of their practices are indeed the best practices the best web agencies employ. Anything else yields lesser results.

The concept of not working with separate actors and stakeholders but getting them all together to create a chemistry is a must.

The designers who make a quick mockup and don’t follow through, we probably all have seen. The idea of designing and having a different party execute it almost never works either. Being engaged in your work and following through is a must.

Not trusting the specialists with their expertise when they say certain things are doable and others are not is also very wise. Having done every step in a project at least once and still being able to do it when called for is very useful.

Projects being quoted exorbitant amounts (especially when dealing with government) even accounting for organizational inefficiency five times over, that have no foundation in reality, we also have seen. As a designer having a notion how much something costs and being able to scope that is also very useful.

So both an architecturally very interesting talk and also very applicable to any kind of creative client work.

Innovatie door innovators

Dit fijne dubbelinterview met Kevin Kelly en Steven Berlin Johnson is nog wel het aardigst omdat het uitlegt waarom we Engels moeten praten.

Johnson: If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect. (Wired)

Omgevingen bouwen waar ideeën zich kunnen verbinden zorgt voor innovatie in de gehele omgeving. Naast nabijheid en toegang is taal een hele belangrijke factor voor de verbinding van ideeën.

Ik zeg altijd dat als je geen Engels op niveau spreekt je in onze business gewoon niet mee doet. Mensen die niet kunnen presenteren in het Engels, niet kunnen werken en brainstormen in het Engels, niet kunnen meekomen zetten de rem op de hele groep.

Nu is het in verreweg de meeste gevallen niet erg. Nederlandse klanten lopen vaak toch een paar jaar achter en zijn ook niet extreem veeleisend. Hun operatiegebied is vaak toch ook beperkt tot Nederland. Voor de kenniswerker die binnen Nederland wil blijven en dat als de grenzen van het niveau wil accepteren is het ook best.

Helemaal leuk is het als je af en toe wel in het buitenland buurt en wat daar staat dan vertaalt en herverpakt voor je klanten in Nederland. Dan lijk je heel wat en je klanten weten toch niet waar je de mosterd vandaan haalt. (Je collega’s daarentegen…)

Maar als je internationale ambitie hebt en écht goede dingen wilt maken is dit alles niet goed genoeg en is vloeiend Engels de allersimpelste basisvereiste.

Weeknotes 185

That was bloody quick

Last week was a short one due to a multitude of other engagements and a weekend trip to Malmö-Lund-Copenhagen from which I returned yesterday.

Project mérida which concerns a collaboration with Buro Pony took up some time and we had a meeting on that on Wednesday.

A bunch of updates on PLAY Pilots were also on the roster and my first (and quite succesful) play at the Stereoscoop during the Film Festival.

Epic Win

An opinion piece I’ve been writing for a national daily has been accepted, but the urgency of the topic has been pushed aside a bit by current political developments in the Netherlands. Here’s hoping it gets published sometime soon.

Wednesday was also the office warming for Lev Kaupas new haunts which was a very lively and entertaining event.

Friend Requests

ANWB stapt uit overleg ov-chipkaart

Dit is interessant nieuws: “ANWB stapt uit overleg ov-chipkaart”.

Het duurt volgens de ANWB te lang voordat reizigers verbeteringen merken, terwijl de uitrol van de OV-chipkaart volop doorgaat en de strippenkaart in steeds meer regio’s wordt afgeschaft.

[…]

ANWB-directeur Guido van Woerkom vindt bovendien dat door alle andere partijen in het overleg “heel slecht wordt geluisterd naar de reiziger”.

Dit zijn dingen die we al wisten en waar ik hier ook al een tijdje over schrijf. Goed om te lezen dat de ANWB bij de goeden hoort in het lopende verhaal van de ov-chipkaart.

Ontwerp

Ik hou al een tijdje vol dat de ov-chipkaart erg onder-ontworpen is. Ik vraag me af of er bij de aanloop enig serieus ontwerp en/of gebruikersonderzoek gedaan is. Het is een wonder nog dat het zo goed werkt als het doet, maar de hoeveelheid gemiste kansen en klant-vijandigheid is verbijsterend.

Tot mijn verbazing hoorde ik op PICNIC meermalen buitenlandse bewondering voor het ov-chipkaart systeem.

Één iemand was blij verbaasd over het feit dat we hier wegwerp RFID-kaartjes hadden. Deze:

1 Hour OV Chipcard

Een ander voerde de ov-chipkaart aan als een voorbeeld van de poldercultuur toegepast op ontwerp. Iets wat ofwel pertinent onwaar is ofwel compleet onwenselijk als we kijken naar het eindresultaat.

Dat toont maar aan dat de ov-chipkaart net zoals wel meer grote concepten een handige olifant is. Iedereen kan het gebruiken om aan te tonen wat hij wil.

The Heist Model: Not hiring anybody

We’re seeing this more and more among the edgiest of shops. The Netherlands has already had a massive shift towards freelancers (ZZP’ers). It is only natural that they would band together regularly to accomplish company level work but without the ties and inertia normally associated with employment.

Anil’s last point in “Upgrades” triggered me to write this, because this is the way we’ve (i.e. Hubbub or Monster Swell) been working together for a while now (and yes Spry Fox is great!) and trying to figure out what the best way moving forward is.

Trying to recruit people seems to me to be a fool’s game. I always feel a bit sorry if I see good people posting jobs or people posting good jobs, because I know how hard those are to fill. At this stage in my life, I wouldn’t work for a company unless they were ridiculously special and made me an extremely good offer. If I look around I don’t know anybody with skills looking for a job.

In short: I wouldn’t want to work with anybody who would work for me.

This isn’t to say that people who work at companies don’t have skills, but those that do are highly sought after and usually have no trouble shaping their own career paths without help from online job postings or head hunters. Of course there are exceptions and if you are serious about hiring and growing a company that way, you would do well take a look at Netflix’s playbook.

Really Networked

The way we have to do it both practically from an overhead, financial risk and skill mix point of view as from a conceptual stance where project demands and excellence drives organizational structure is a kind of networked agency. But as Spry Fox explains, this is a newfound model compared to the old networked agency. Which used to be mostly agency cores supplemented by more than occasional freelancers.

The way to work with the best of the best: usually fluid usually creative partnerships, open for repeats, trust and transfer of agency. People need to be rewarded both financially but also with work that is worthwhile. Trust means accepting the edges of your collaborators as a tradeof for their ability and trusting that what they do will be the best to all your ability

To be able to do this, some basic structures need to be in place both physically, infrastructurally but also conceptually. Aligning cognitive wave lengths with a suitable group of people and keeping hold of freelancers with meaningful availability is hard enough as it is.

What seem to me to be important ingredients for building these structures are:

  • A strong thematic focus so that everybody participating knows what it is you are doing and why you are doing it. A repeatable but also scalable back story.
  • Buy-in. Ensure that everybody has enough skin in the game for it not to be a 9-to-5 commitment. The success of the project is shared success. They are partners not employees or outsourcing shops.

There are tons of issues which I’m going to leave out for now. I don’t have the time or the ability right now to write the end-all on this subject and we’re inventing most of this as we go along anyway. Your experiences and questions would be helpful.

Update: after a late night conversation, we dubbed this the Heist model of collaborating.

Update: James Governor points to a Business Week article on the same trend “Entrepreneurs: Struggling to Recruit Software Engineers” (without much of a solution though).

Spiegel van Holland

Gisteren een potje Stereoscoop gespeeld op de Neude in Utrecht en daar een gigantische buit binnengehaald. Deze badges staan nu op mijn profiel te prijken:
Epic Win

Het is echt een heel leuk spelletje wat je pas echt merkt als je hem zelf speelt. Dus hij staat nog een paar dagen op de Neude dus ga er even heen als je in de buurt bent.

De Stereoscoop

Nu mét NRC Next artikel:

PLAY Pilots De Stereoscoop in NRC Next #NFF

Week 184

Last week was mostly busy with getting http://playpilots.nl to talk nicely to the Stereoscoop live game and make stuff work (mostly) properly back and forth. Synchronizing physical installations with websites is always fun.

Monday we also saw the launch of Stweetfightr, a game by the friendly people from Carsonified. The mechanic is mostly the same as PLAY Pilots, with roles, moves and turn taking except that theirs is resolved by a straight roshambo mechanic (one which we considered, but rejected).

Quantified Self Amsterdam

Monday I also attended the first meetup of the Quantified Self Amsterdam chapter co-organized by our office’s Maarten den Braber.

The second half of this week was taken up mostly by PICNIC which was a great event again. Criticism aside, Amsterdam should celebrate a cross-over event such as this that combines various disciplines and gets so many luminaries to coalesce within its borders. The conference was great and even better the catching up with various people from across the world.

Dutch Data Drinks

Friday the Stereoscoop was launched oficially at the Dutch Film Festival. I unfortunately could not attend this because I was organizing the first Dutch Data Drinks for Monster Swell. A resounding succes and the first of many events focused on the coming Big Data trend.

P1050479.JPG.scaled1000.jpg (1000×750)
Uploaded with Skitch!

Friday our friends from the Utrechts Uitburo also launched their integration with Foursquare (the first in the Netherlands), something which has been a long time in the making. Writeup: Foursquare Page for Utrechts Uitburo

PICNIC taking a large bite out of the week’s productivity, the weekend suffered (in a good way).

Urban Lenses

On Saturday I sat on the terrace of Two for Joy catching the last rays of the sun, while sketching out a concept model for an ethnographical study of metropolitan minorities in the Netherlands with regards to digital services and informal economy.
This was partly prompted by the Urban Lenses panel at PICNIC where certain panelists displayed an inexcusable amount of cultural insensitivity and simplistic thinking. This is a tendency among many of our colleagues to see their affluent, technologically able, privileged selfs as the model for which to design. Not to mention to see the disconnect between the nation’s policies and its ethnically diverse periphery high streets.
I propose going into these burbs and talking to these people to see what their lives are really like and how they use technology. Think Jan Chipchase but without the permafuck1. A project for fun, but I can’t guarantee we won’t make any profit. Up for it?

Model

You may have noticed the transition of Monster Swell from a static placeholder site to a full WordPress installation of its own. That is the first improvement on that domain for it to become a fully scalable information consuming and producing entity. How that will impact this weblog remains to be seen.

Sunday was occupied by taking the Urbanode integration at the Melkweg to a next step and learning more and more about lighting systems. Also project mérida started with some custom django deployment more on which later.

  1. Don’t worry, you will get tired plenty. []

Dutch Data Drinks

There’s a lot of stuff happening in the Dutch Data Scene and more communication and consolidation of efforts is in order.

Quoting from the Facebook event (Plancast) I created:

Open drinks for the Dutch Open Data / Dataviz Community next to PICNIC ( http://www.picnicnetwork.org/ ) both for conference attendees and those that want to attend but can’t.

There are more and more people busy with data in the Netherlands, but most of the efforts are widely disparate. PICNIC seems like a good focal point for various efforts to come together.

This is an informal Friday afternoon drink meant to get everybody together and talking about data. Topics include: open data, government information, data visualization, cartography, statistics, data mining, journalism and pretty much anything generating, processing or consuming data.

This will probably be the first of a recurring event. I know a ton of people in various domains very busy with data and it will be to the benefit of us all if we talk to one another. Don’t worry if you can’t make it to this one. There will be more.

Event details:
Friday, September 24 · 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Location: het Ketelhuis

Pazzanistraat 25-29
Amsterdam, Netherlands

Supremacy

I went to the penultimate day of the Matisse to Malevich exposition in the Amsterdam Hermitage for some visual inspiration.

Stunning works by Matisse, especially his red room:

Red Room

Not much a fan of the inbetweenist fauvist works on display, though most of them looked nice. The various Picassos strewn about were a welcome distraction.

Like I tweeted, you have all this colour and style and visual artistry, and then you get: Malevich. Black Square; game, set and match.

Hard to imagine a bigger “Fuck you!”

Week 182

The belated weeknotes for the last week. My apologies. Another inbetween week, with a ton of events.

Monday was Mobile Monday on design with great performances by Arnall and Webb. Good to see our Dutch friends exposed to real design (i.e. not solving problems). Let’s hope interesting and valuable stuff comes from it.

Tuesday I read into a bunch of arcane protocol stuff for Urbanode and went to a lecture by landscape architect Ronald Rietveld (my notes).

Wednesday I got to talk with some of the chief creative minds in the Southern Randstad. Expect some awesome visuals headed this way sometime soonish.

Thursday marked another bunch of wrap-up and attendance of the UX Cocktail Hours (which were hosted by SapientNitro and quite ace).

(Friday was occupied with more of the above.)

Ronald Rietveld ARCAM lecture – “People go to Berlin because they think there’s all that free space there, while there is more than plenty here in Amsterdam.”

Alexander and I attended the ARCAM lecture tonight where landscape architect Ronald Rietveld (Rietveld Landscape) sketched a future for Amsterdam that isn’t dormant and touristic, but somewhat ambitious even.

These are the rough notes from the presentation1:

Going to explain his fascinations by way of his work.

Starts with Amsterdam party scene and scenes from the RoXY. Amsterdam used to be very dynamic in the early 90s.

Fascinated by the underground. Also did an exploration of the meatpacker district of NYC. Holes in the urban fabric allow for dynamism to arise.

Freestate Amsterdam project for the Rotterdam biennale to see about a different way to think about urban planning in the West Port of Amsterdam. It’s a massive port that is mostly unknown and unloved.

The importance of fertile ground for the creative city. In the 80s city center was the freestate of Amsterdam. Roxy became an exponent of the House Revolution and a focal point of the creative industry.

Roxy’s produce:

  • Decor
  • DJ and VJ as export products
  • Graphic design
  • Gay-parade/capital
  • Amsterdam Dance Event
  • Inspiration

His isn’t the city as defined by top down city marketing but by bottom up creation.

After that the IJ shores became the new freestate. With the following progression:

  1. Old industry
  2. Emptiness
  3. Recolonization by festivals
  4. Metropolitan connection
  5. Trendies start to arrive (MTV)
  6. Urbanists and architects arrive

There is now a collective feeling that there isn’t space anymore in Amsterdam to execute creative ideas.

Stubnitz: the boat of the hundred subcultures where different people meet each other (and that has been closed down by the city)

Pluk de Nacht: empty plot of land, 20000 people in 10 days2

Amsterdam should notice and cherish it’s talent instead of running it out of town.

Shouldn’t a city that wants to become a creative capital have a different approach to city planning?

West port has a bunch of environmental advantages:

  • Free sound
  • Free height
  • No Stadsdeel
  • Lots of free space
  • High diversity of terrains that are temporarily empty

Houtveemloods near Westerpark
Used to be a public swimming area in 1954
Proposals to move abandoned oil rigs from the North Sea to behind westerpark (massively high structures). They are waiting to be repaired in the Waddenzee and costing money.

New Amsterdam Park

Another island was planned near java eiland. A park was necessary.

Focus on different subcultures instead of ethnicity. Shared interests. Try to look for the tension between the subcultures.

Social affordances, the affordances an environment offers for social interaction. (Thesis by his brother.)

Moor a bunch of barges (duwbakken) there with a every barge hosting a different taste/vibe/culture module of the park. Every container is connected with each other. Temporary park.

Another inspiration is: trip through emptiness

Road trip through the flyover states and national parks of the USA

Same phenomena can be applied to the port of Rotterdam. Removed shame green to emphasize the emptiness of the landscape and the activities of the port. Add a flyover highway also to make the port more visible.

Recognize the existing qualities of a place and try to add to those without detrimenting from the original experience.

Asfalt dune where you can drive out onto the sea but in fact do not.

Nice datavisualization of the drive trail of how freely people use the road to go to the Maasmond.

Bunker 599
Cut a bunker in half to make the inside experiencable.

Vacant NL
Dutch biennale pavilion

Empty public buildings. Not the empty office buildings. The period between emptiness and repurposing. The time it takes our policy makers to talk about plans. Combined with the knowledge and innovation agenda of the Netherlands to be in the top-5 of the world.

Why these buildings?

  • Old stuff inspires new ideas
  • Unique affordances for use
  • Less rules present
  • Affordable space for talent

Show affordances for reusing the empty buildings temporally in a creative economic context. It seems that Groningen is already quite far ahead with this compared to the Rim City area.

Blood sweat and tears to get the entire thing up and running.

There is enough creative potential to fill this up. People move to Berlin because they think there’s space and opportunity there while there could be more than enough of both in the Netherlands.

There’s a ton of architectural experience in the room that is very skeptical of temporary reuse, Dutch civil servants’ risk avoidance and slow moving government processes.

In the Netherlands people start inventarizing what could go wrong and nobody wants to take responsibility.

Update: Streamlined a bit more and added links.

  1. They will be revised a bit further and I’ll add my comments tomorrow. []
  2. Some old dude was really negative about Pluk de Nacht, but I think everybody I know that went was totally positive about the festival. []

Week 181

Last week was a short one and mostly spent in preparation of work writing proposals and quotes. I hope we can wrap all that stuff up this week and go back into grand scale production mode.

The biggest thing to do last week was to transition the PLAY Pilots twitter bot to use OAuth. I just found this article “Setting Up Twitter Bots with OAuth” that describes exactly what I did (without having read it). Twitter’s documentation is a bit shoddy in this respect.

The week was cut short because of a trip to London and Brighton for dConstruct. It gets a bit routine but I greatly enjoyed the second half of more conceptual and broad reaching presentations (Tom Coates completely crushed it) that are not directly concerned with the day to day operations of an agency1. I wrote up my hyper-connected London tourism experience yesterday in: “Boris Bikes are made of epic win”

Housekeeping: @ouroffice (in photos) is due for some upgrades in the near future and it looks like we will be getting 1-3 new openings. The location is pretty ace, the rent is crazy cheap and the company is good and may get better depending on what you’re bringing. So if you’re professional and design minded, get in touch2. It will be good to work together.

  1. Something I know many people attending do want to hear about if only to justify to themselves why they went. []
  2. Or talk to me this afternoon at the MoMo about design which you should be attending anyway. []

Boris Bikes are made of epic win

This week I had my yearly trip to the UK to attend the dConstruct conference in Brighton. Usually I add some time to visit London too and explore the things that need exploring.

This year (like last) I stayed at Cristiano1 and Melinda’s place near Canada Water but contrary to last year, Cristiano equipped me with all the material necessary for a roving networked urbanist. I got to borrow his MiFi and his Barclays Cycle Hire key and it made a ridiculous amount of difference. So much so that I don’t know if I’ll want to travel any other way.

Boris Bikes!

Barclays Bikes or as they are commonly known, Boris Bikes, are a brand new cycle hire scheme similar to the Vélib’ system in Paris and not so similar to the Dutch OV-fiets (which I wrote on before). The rates are ridiculously cheap, cheaper even than the OV-fiets here though the model is different. A Boris Bike does not have a lock and needs to be returned to a station when you are not riding it. For a fee of 45/year you can get up to four hire keys and any trip shorter than 30 minutes is free.

Getting around in London becomes much easier using a bike despite the heavy traffic2. Trips that would take an hour using the tube take less than half of that time using a bike. London roads are congested, and it takes some adjustment to the traffic direction for a person from the continent but it is more than doable. Boris Bikes also seem to be contributing to the increase in critical mass that had already started.

The first time I rode the bike was nice (though intimidating) but when I then returned it to its station, drove it into the rack and felt it fit and the lock snap shut accompanied with the light turning green, I had a massive victory grin on my face. Anybody witnessing that must have concluded that I was deranged (or extraordinarily happy).

The trips I did on the bike that day:

  • Old Street to Old Broad Street (for Taylor St. Baristas)
  • Old Broad Street to Shoreditch High Street
  • British Library to Serpentine Gallery3
  • Serpentine Gallery to Mornington Crescent4

You can see an increase in the distance I covered with each subsequent ride. The MiFi was essential in making these trips. I needed to figure out quickly where to return the bike within the 30 minute window and for that the Cycle Hire iPhone app (there seem to be a bunch5 ) proved to be indispensable. Quickly pinpointing a station with empty spots6.

The Cycle Hire App is really nicely designed, uses a custom mapping layer which looks very good and lists the cycle hire locations nearest to you which you can also click to see if there are any bikes (or free spots!) available. This way it becomes easier to navigate the city and be able to also plan your drop off point.

The fact that all the cycle hire locations are fully networked and provide live updates as to their status not only enables properly designed applications for various platforms but also has sparked a lively visualization and analysis. Frankly, I’m fucking jealous especially compared to the shabby web and service experiences provided by our Dutch OV-fiets system (just check out this map).

Some conclusions:

If you build a service it has to be at once useful and user friendly and don’t forget the service touch points as well as the network connections are an essential part of that service. Of course we already knew this, but having real life examples where both the design and implementation have amounted to a clear success will only help tell this story and convince decision makers. Boris Bikes were a pleasure to use and I hope they remain so. Viewed in a broader perspective it is also an example of public services that can work and are a pleasure to use. It is what we should aspire to.

I noticed this already on my trip to New York but it became only more salient on this trip to London. Having a permanent connection to the internet along with an Oyster card and a Cycle Hire key expanded my latitude immensely. I crammed the stuff you would normally do over a 2-3 day span into a single day which had other consequences7, but for the kind of travelling I like to do it is a pretty nice fit.
Flat rate internet along with access to the network of local services using that connection is the future of any travel experience. The time saved looking at maps, trying to decipher transportation schedules and waiting for vehicles is time much better spent doing other things both home and abroad. The high octane type of tourism this enables may not be to everybody’s liking8 but adding choice and removing friction should always be a positive thing —except in the most philosophical of cases.
Furthermore, adding cloud based network services such as these both of the informational variety as of the tangible one (objects becoming services) supported by a smartphone and a credit card has the potential to obliterate the difference between being a local and a tourist. Walk around a city supported by seamless payment and transportation, as well as real-time translation of all foreign language inputs, a global recommender system trained on you for the parts of the city —the very shops to visit and avoid, and a permanent connection to your social network to keep in touch and share experiences with; walking around a foreign city could be as familiar and pleasurable as walking around your hometown, probably even more so.

Lastly wandering around a city without aim or direction is a lot easier using a GPS assisted map (such as Google’s) than it is using a paper one. If you’ve ever walked around a foreign city using a map or guidebook, you’ll have experienced the cognitive load of keeping track on the map where you are. Not so with a GPS device. You can wander around as much as you’re comfortable with and as soon as you’re done with that you can open the digital map, pin-point where you are and look for the nearest bus/tube/exit to go somewhere else. GPS empowers and enables a much clearer choice of knowing where you are and getting lost. The true traveller’s way is of course getting lost on purpose and then asking a local the way back9, but seriously who ever does that?

  1. Cristiano’s project Minutebox won an award while I was staying there. Check it out! []
  2. As a Dutch person, I was born on a bike and had little trouble navigating London streets. []
  3. Normally you have to walk some fifteen minutes through Kensington Gardens to get there. Currently there are two cycle hire stations next to the gallery. []
  4. Did that run in some twenty minutes, which I hear is pretty good time… []
  5. Just imagine that! Having several apps to choose between for a public service instead of one app that barely works. []
  6. Hard sometimes even though the stations are being rebalanced continuously. []
  7. Already completely knackered after the day’s exploring, getting 8+ hours of sleep becomes more important. Hardly any energy left for extended socializing at night time. You probably could push through, but I wouldn’t want to know how 5-7 days going at this pace feels. []
  8. Some people seem to go on holiday to relax. []
  9. I tried that in Salé. Not the best experience ever. []

Week 180

Last week was concerned with finalizing stuff for the first presentation of guadalajara. The current concept was more exploratory, we do not seem to have found the point of relevance yet to move forward.

A friendly neighborhood visit to the nice people at Johnny Wonder. And another chat about open data for the city of Amsterdam. Also continued writing a bunch more proposals.

Finally finished importing the videos and the race times for Wip ‘n’ Kip on the PLAY Pilots website. Glorious slow motion for you to behold.

Five things I’ve been thinking on

Others have done this, but these are my thoughts.

  • What comes after the peak meme blender of the internet
    It looks like anything done these days is being repurposed, remixed, refabbed, torn apart and inserted in LOLcats so quickly that the point of doing stuff, the notion of authorship and the requirements of originality are becoming completely blurred. One exponent of this movement are hipsters and trying to figure out what is next is pointless because whatever it is, it will become reappropriated and reblended to be part of the current meme-blob.
    So I’m thinking: there must be something possible after this all (for god’s sake, there has to be!), and one of its qualities necessarily has to be its imperviousness to remixing. What could it be?
  • Old world quaintness compared to new world innovation
    I live in the old world and despite itches to move to the old new world (and thinking about the new new world) I am still holding out in the quaint village-like entity that is Amsterdam. We have social security, insurances, education, cheap(-ish) living expenses and most of the stuff you would need to have a decent life. This cocoon has also made us so bored with everything that nobody is doing much of anything. Compare this to China where they are doing all kind of zanyness which is real, like first person shooter cams on police squads, and second story highway buses and superfast trains. At this rate, China may hit singularity and it would take 10+ years for its effects to even reach us here in our insulation.
    What is preferrable, comfort or edge? Especially in an uncertain world where prior securities are falling apart quicker than we can imagine. Obviously given the choice, being born and educated in comfort is better. We are ridiculously privileged.
  • The immorality of leisure culture
    I already touched upon this concerning hipsters and quaintness. We are so bored here that most people’s stated life goal is to have fun. Nothing else. There is a whole leisure industry of festivals, where people go to for the sole purpose of gaining new experiences and mostly to get fucked up and call in sick for work the next day. If the sun is out in Amsterdam and it’s beer o’clock (16:00), everybody is out on a boat or on a terrace enjoying themselves. Dutch activism is limited to the sort you can do while partying. No more chaining yourself to things, unless somebody can think of a way of making it enjoyable.
    I’m not saying there is anything wrong in enjoying yourself. I do it myself from time to time. But I do find it deeply immoral to have it be your sole life goal. There is so much out there to do that is meaningful, worthwhile and fulfilling/deeply pleasurable. Why not go do some of that?
  • Gaming
    It started more in earnest with Sebastian Deterding’s presentation “Just Add Points” and culminated in our design and creation of the PLAY Pilots website. Gaming is fun and in cases, worthwhile. Added to that games are the most difficult type of software —be it rules written in computers or on other media— both to think right and to execute properly. This is where it is at if you enjoy difficult stuff (and who doesn’t?).
    Also I can’t in earnest be bothered with any console games (there goes 20 hours of your life…). I’m more interested in games’ impact on sociality, urbanism and (gaming) other systems. Also: Games ♥ Data.
  • Prosody
    (I had to throw in an ultra-vague one.) Trying to think in terms of tone (and also dramaturgy) when it comes to language, concept and act, but this is immensely difficult to do. Just from the most concrete, trying to write a sonnet and looking for aesthetic freedom in a force field of meaning, grammar and sound all the way to more complex acts of performance, presentation and rhetoric.

Glad to hear I’m not the only one thinking of Maneki Neko all the time. I have been since I first read it years back. And of course also always thinking of food and travel, of the Primer, Jason Bourne and executing a minimal material lifestyle.

How does this work? Can I tag others? Maybe some Dutch people for a change (Dutch allowed, English preferred): Kars Alfrink (thanks!), Olaf Koens, Jaap Stronks, Ernst-Jan Pfauth, Anne Helmond1

  1. I don’t want to burden you guys with a stupid meme, but I suspect you may have interesting thoughts. []

Week 179

Last week was a quiet one.

Updates to Ebi and a preparation of the movies and game data from Stekkerfest.

Writing and submitting proposals to various affairs and agencies around the Netherlands (expect a bunch of new code names, soon!).

Started pushing the agenda for Open City Amsterdam.

A bunch of sketching and research for nezahualcoyotl.

Also thinking and preparing a study/business trip to Syria probably somewhere in the second half of October.

Design Directie #1

‘Design Directie’ is een periodiek stukje van Alper over het raakvlak van design en technologie met de maatschappij1.

Op dit moment worden we niet bestuurd en moeten we wachten op een formatie die lang duurt, niet transparant is en een resultaat gaat opleveren waar de helft van het land niet op zit te wachten. Dit proces voelt sub-optimaal en achterhaald aan.

Het besturen van een land is niks meer dan een complex ontwerp-probleem op macro-niveau. Dingen ontwerpen is iets wat we kunnen. Er is een methode voor en het is vaak na afloop ook duidelijk of een ontwerp geslaagd is of niet. Het is een rationeel wetenschappelijk/creatief proces met tastbare uitkomsten. Als het mogelijk is om een iPod of een Boeing te ontwerpen, dan kun je die methoden ook gebruiken voor een landsbestuur. Wat zou er gebeuren als we het ontwerpproces over de politiek heen legden?

Bij het maken van een ontwerp kijk je naar de doelen. Dus: waar willen we heen met dit land? Je doet onderzoek onder gebruikers (het electoraat) in het veld (tijdens de campagne) en je market de oplossingen waar je mee gaat komen (verkiezingsbeloften). Hieruit volgt een model waar je mee kunt werken. Met dat model kun je plannen maken. Je hebt dan een designdocument (een regeerakkoord) waarmee je aan de slag kunt.

Het enige waar je dus echt over moet praten zijn de doelen. Ik heb het idee dat die bij alle partijen niet eens zo ver uit elkaar liggen. Iedereen wil toch een veilig land, een goede gezondheidszorg en een competitief onderwijs en economie? Hoe je dat doet volgt uit de ontwerpmethode: onderzoek doen, ideeën verzinnen, toetsen aan het de werkelijkheid en resultaten boeken.

Hoe anders is dit in de politiek. Partijen gaan er gemakzuchtig van uit dat ze al weten wat er leeft, ook al zitten ze grotendeels in Den Haag. Campagne voeren is meer een show dan dat er oprechte interesse voor de kiezer is. De beloften zijn vaak te concreet én onrealistisch zodat die direct sneuvelen in compromissen. Mensen geloven na de uitslag al niet meer waar ze in gestemd hebben, laat staan dat je ze enthousiast kunt houden. En de resultaten… daar hoor ik nooit iemand over.

Goede ontwerpers gaan uit van de werkelijkheid en handelen in gelijke delen visie, gezond verstand en realisme. Politici zo zien we gaat het meer om zelfbehoud, het spelen op de onderbuik en het in stand houden van illusies. Ontwerpers die politiek voeren of in politieke organisaties werken, komen zelden tot goede resultaten. Politici die wat meer methoden uit de ontwerppraktijk gebruiken, daar zouden we wel weer wat vertrouwen in kunnen hebben.

Elke Design Directie wordt hier gepubliceerd en bij de eerste publicatie die hem wil overnemen (aanmeldingen).

  1. En boven alles een experiment. []

Weeknotes 176

This week was completely spent with work each day on project Ebi, better known as PLAY Pilots. The site is due to launch this week (it in fact launched yesterday night).

Two other noteworthy events transpired:

I got a new avatar picture taken by Daphne Horn. My current avatar picture was long overdue for a refresh and Daphne’s offer to get my picture taken by a professional photographer proved to be both very fun and resulted in a very nice photo. The picture is now live on my account. A preview was on Daphne’s tumblr.

Sunday marked the end of the Dutch mission in Afghanistan, so I used some downtime on Saturday to finish project puebla which is a small map with the origins of our 24 fallen (write-up).

The launch of PLAY Pilots is going to be interesting, and there’s a bunch of other stuff coming up: nezahualcoyotl, guadalajara and some other proposals are progressing nicely.

Check in / Check Out – Design Principles for Camera Surveillance

Here the first of my English translations of the design principles outlined in the Dutch book by Rathenau about the digitalization of society and its implications.

The book is quite good and I think these design principles deserve a wider audience. I’ll get to noting down the ones from chapter 0001 in a bit, now just the ones from the (second) chapter 0010 which was unfortunately of somewhat meager interest.

Camera surveillance can serve as an example for other applications in the public space. There is a legal framework in which camera surveillance is allowed, which functions properly and can serve as an example for other technologies. In the ’90s camera surveillance was a means that was subject to public and political debate. Based on these discussions, legislation has been instituted that limits citizens’ privacy violations. You can’t put cameras on the street without adhering to certain rules. There are also clear rules what can be done with captured data from which we can distill the following design principles.

  • Privacy in public is a problem case in and of itself.
    You are visible for everybody and you cannot invoke the right of protection of the personal living sphere when you’re out and about. In the public domain the collective interests of safety and order trump the individual right of privacy.
  • Who does not commit any offenses should stay anonymous.
    Even though it is possible to watch everybody using camera surveillance, it is not necessary to identify everybody. Only if it is necessary for police work should an image be linked to a person.
  • Watch the watchers.
    As information becomes more and more centralized, it gives more oversight and power to those that watch over those being watched. According to the rules of the panopticon, this increase needs to be combined with a corresponding increase of control over the center. Camera surveillance also has synoptic elements. Technology needs to be used by citizens who want to check on government as much as by the government to check on its citizens.

This is a quick and rough translation but it should serve most applications.

The legislation that works properly that is referred to above is the one that’s in place in the Netherlands. In how far that is the case can be subject to debate, but most people in the Netherlands do not object to camera surveillance, so there is democratic support for camera surveillance.

Check in / Check Out, Case by Case — Case 0010, “Straatbeelden”

Niet zoveel aan te merken op dit hoofdstuk. Ook niet heel erg mijn interessegebied.

Algemeen over de huidige stand van zaken wat betreft het camera-toezicht, de wettelijke kaders en hier en daar wat dingen over het concept panopticon en in hoeverre dit geldt wanneer het verzamelen en het bekijken van de beelden gedistribueerd zijn.

Frappantste is dat de grootste ontwikkeling in het camera-toezicht komt door het internet omdat nu waarschijnlijk het grootste deel van de camera-beelden over internetverbindingen met redelijke standaardprotocollen zal gebeuren. Ik neem aan dat het hiervoor met veel proprietaire systemen gebeurde, die daardoor moeilijk aan elkaar te koppelen waren. Hier dus ook weer IP als grote gelijkmaker.

Systemen die camera-toezicht efficiënter moeten maken en potentieel hele grote privacy-inbreuken kunnen veroorzaken zoals het detecteren van ongewenst gedrag —Wat is ongewenst gedrag?— en het volgen van mensen door bestanden en systemen heen, zijn allemaal nog niet zo ver dat we ons daar zorgen over moeten maken.

Maar ik denk wel dat we ons daar nu al zorgen over moeten maken. Ik vind dat in dit hoofdstuk die toekomst wanneer computers net zo goed en misschien wel beter dan mensen beelden kunnen verwerken en de gevolgen daarvan niet voldoende verkend worden. Het zal misschien wat langer duren, maar ik denk zeker dat dat er gaat komen.

Weeknotes 174

Project Ebi is taking most of my capacity and brain these days, so everything else is necessarily pushed to the back burner a bit.

In other news…

I started drafting an open letter in Dutch regarding the information platform for transit data for the Netherlands which will be created in the near future. We (Open Data Nederland) want this platform to be open and inclusive to enable the greatest potential for innovation.

Talked about an interesting quantified self dataviz project (codename: nezahualcoyotl) with a well-known hardware maker. More dataviz is forthcoming:
puebla got its public deadline (which is quite shortly) but could use some visual design attention
guadelajara got its datasets after some gentle nudging of authorities, expect some first draft renders for that soon

I also did a bunch of beta testing of Peerz. A Dutch startup I did the initial IA/IxD for. You can try it out yourself and could even win an iPad for your efforts.

Distilling meter, rhyme and verse from your database

I don’t know how I missed this job in my post this year on “New disciplines for a real-time data world” but this week the position for a Data Griot and Community Activator popped up at Last.fm and was brought to my attention by Chris Heathcote’s post who did some griotting into Grindr (an interesting app worth a post on its own).

The posited Data Griot is a great position that combines institutional knowledge and knowledge of data with public understanding. There is so much work to be done in this field to increase public awareness of the importance of and practices around data that it’s quite staggering. Nice on Last.fm too to have coined such an apt phrase for it.

So the Griot has both a deep knowledge of history and trends as well as a finger on the pulse of current events and combines both to create acute relevance. She is ad res and can combine resources both within and outside of the organization with social/technical/design skills of her own to massive effect.

Sounds like a very nice job. An important role already in journalistic and political organizations if they manage to see the need. In corporations any aspiring griot will have a hard time the further their work is diluted by PR/Legal/Accounting/Marketing and other departments. But most likely they won’t hire one anyway. Those companies that have a solid (mutual) relation with the public and a track record of rapid innovation (like most web2.0 sites) will be in a better position to act than others (not to say that other companies can’t benefit, but they’ll have a lot of institutional learning and organizational change to do at the same time).

The Griot goes beyond the already known data scientist position which seems to be less of a conversational and more of an academic/metrics one and actually is a really tall order to fill. More organizations are looking for griots but because it is at the same time both broad and specialized1 that will be pretty hard.

In the Netherlands there are already so few people active in the data field that it’s even more difficult. I would be a good fit for the role, though I’m not looking for a permanent position —organizational embedding (i.e. not consulting) is I think an important requirement for somebody doing this. I know nrc.next has some people dedicated among which Thalia Verkade. I don’t know about the other papers.

But maybe there are more that I am missing. Is your organization looking for data griots? Are you one yourself? I’d like to hear more.

Update: My friends at QD are doing some very cool things with internet tracking and have an open position for a function that borders on this: A Statistical Market Researcher.

  1. The UX profession prides itself on T-shaped people but most people working there aren’t nearly wide or deep enough for this work. []

UX Triangle

Some conversations with Jaap Stronks for the terminology and the rifts between UX designers I am witnessing more and more on events (dConstruct, The Web and Beyond) sparked this model below.

UX Triangle

The Guerilla UX tries to do the most damage with a minimal amount of resources. They either work in a small web shop in an UX role for clients without any budget or in a larger company that doesn’t recognize UX as a field to allocate proper resources to. The guerilla UX person may be stuck in a related role, or may have to take heroic measures to secure funding and room to get any UX work done and implemented.
The upcoming book Undercover UX seems to exemplify this style.

The Enterprise UX works in an organization that has buy-in into UX and ample resources to allocate people, time, usability labs and other elaborate contraptions to the UX problem. With all this latitude to operate providing good UX is still a daunting challenge because bureaucracy, poor management and lack of organizational vision may each in some measure stymie the end result.

The Frontier UX does stuff that most other people in the field hardly recognize as being the same discipline or having any value at all. This has has consequences for the kind of work and clients practitioners in this field can get. They do their part in advancing the field pioneering new methods and implementations in the face of uncertainty and rather poor odds of survival.

Where do you fit on this triangle? Where do you want to be? And better yet, can you do more than one at once or are you firmly entrenched?

Check in / Check Out, Case by Case — Case 0001, “Pasjes en poortjes”

Ik ben het boek “Check in / Check out” van het Rathenau Instituut aan het lezen.

Het boek gaat over de digitalisering van de openbare ruimte en welke gevolgen dat heeft voor de privacy van de Nederlanders. Het boek is opgebouwd uit een serie cases en die zal ik hier één voor één lezen en mijn opmerkingen plaatsen.

Case 0001 — “Pasjes en poortjes”

Er worden zes doelstellingen genoemd ‘van de vervoerder en technologie-aanbieders’:

1. eerlijke en actuele verrekenening van kosten en opbrengsten
2. betere managementinformatie
3. tariefdifferentiatie
4. betere sociale veiligheid
5. betaalgemak voor de klant
6. mogelijkheden voor aanvullende diensten (p. 42)

In dat rijtje mis ik een zevende doelstelling die je uiteraard niet zult horen van de vervoerders en ook niet van de technologie-aanbieders die door hen zijn opgezet:
7. Het openbreken van de markt door betalingen te standaardiseren en de betalingsfrictie weg te nemen en zo concurrentie in het (openbaar) vervoer te vergemakkelijken.

Elke andere aanbieder van vervoer heeft het probleem dat potentiele reizigers erachter moeten komen 1. wanneer ze dat middel kunnen gebruiken en 2. hoe ze daar dan voor kunnen betalen. Het standaardiseren van de informatie in het NDOV en de betaling in de ov-chipkaart en beide middelen laagdrempelig inplugbaar maken voor meer partijen kan leiden tot een dynamischer systeem van Transmobiliteit.

Opvallend weinig mensen blijken zich zorgen te maken over het gebruik van hun persoonsgegevens. (p. 49)

Als mensen zich geen zorgen maken is er voor een groot deel ook geen probleem. Privacy is voor een groot deel een kwestie van perceptie.

De vervoeraanbieder heeft echter geen live-informatie over de reizigerstromen. (p. 57)

Hier komen we straks ook op. Er is dus een systeem dat periodiek informatie doorstuurt. Raar in deze netwerksamenleving en ook niet nodig. Volgens mij zitten er in de meeste message queue systemen robuuste functionaliteit om berichten over het netwerk te sturen en bij netwerkfalen ze lokaal op te slaan tot ze wel verstuurd kunnen worden.

Reizigersinformatie kan worden gebruikt voor opsporingsdoeleinden en marketing, maar blijkt van beperkte waarde. (p. 58)

Dit is interessant maar het is de vraag of je deze gegevens dan maar niet moet opslaan, met name omdat de gegevens voor de gebruikers ook van waarde kunnen zijn. Een anonieme kaart die niet inferieur is aan de persoonsgebonden kaart lijkt het beste alternatief voor diegenen die hun privacy willen behouden.

Daarnaast is er ook een referentie naar de Digital Security Group (DSG) van Bart Jacobs die met financiele steun van NLnet werkt aan een OV-chipkaart 2.0 (p. 60). Iets wat hard nodig blijkt.

RET en GVB zijn daarom van plan abonnementhouders die niet hebben ingecheckt, bij controle te beboeten met 35 euro voor het niet hebben van een geldig vervoersbewijs. Los van het feit dat dit onsympathiek overkomt, is nog onduidelijk of dit juridisch wel kan. (p. 61)

Bovenstaande laat zien hoe technocratisch de bestuurders van de vervoersmaatschappijen denken.

Ik mis deze vraag in de privacy-afweging van de ov-chipkaart: Worden contacten met de conducteur zoals controles en boetes ook vastgelegd in het systeem? Bouw je zo een strafblad op en wat voor gevolgen heeft dat?

Deze zogenaamde location based services heeft de staatssecretaris vooralsnog verboden. (p. 67)

De location based services hierboven worden alleen maar gezien in het kader van de broodjesverkoper die je korting wil geven als je op hetzelfde station bent. De aloude natte droom van de marketeers.

Wat niet mee wordt genomen is de opkomst van locatie-gebaseerde diensten die door mensen zelf worden gebruikt om hun leven vast te leggen en om meer context toe te kennen aan hun dagelijks handelen. Locatie gebaseerde spellen, locatie brokers en andere interessante dingen die je zelf met je locatie kunt doen, kunnen heel waardevol zijn maar zijn niet in het systeem of in de afweging meegenomen (en worden ook vermoeilijkt doordat het systeem niet real-time is).

Naar onze mening is het systeem vooralsnog teveel vanuit de vervoerders aan de reizigers opgelegd en zal dat het systeem op de lange termijn opbreken. Dit net neemt – zonder veel terug te geven.
Inzicht in transactie via mijnovchipkaart.nl kwam pas lang nadat het systeem al was in gevoerd (En is traag en vaak stuk. -Alper). De NDOV (Nationale Database Openbaar Vervoersgegevens), die ook de bewegingen van de voertuigen inzichtelijk zou moeten maken, laat nog lang op zich wachten. Een best pricing system is ooit overwogen, maar nooit ingevoerd. Het enige voordeel is vooralsnog betaalgemak, al zal niet elke reiziger de nieuwe manier van betalen echt handiger vinden. (p.68)

Gemiste kansen en het compleet negeren van de eindgebruiker is in het kort het verhaal van de OV-chipkaart.

Maak duidelijk wie de reizigersidentiteiten beheert en dat ook degenen die kijken worden gecontroleerd.

Hier zou het bijvoorbeeld interessant kunnen zijn om elke toegang tot je gegevens ook op mijnovchipkaart.nl weer te geven. Ge-anonimiseerd qua naam maar niet qua functie zodat je kunt zien wie in welke rol wanneer welke gegevens van jou bekeken heeft.

Zoek oplossingen voor systeemfalen in het systeem zelf en niet in het bestraffen van reizigers.

Zomaar een idee.

Overweeg een ‘live’-scenario.
De reizigersdata worden momenteel gebufferd en zijn daardoor altijd verouderd.

Gek dat we net nu we aanstalten maken om het real-time internet in te gaan, zitten met een systeem waar alle transacties gespooled worden in buffers van soms wel meerdere dagen. Heb je zo’n gigantische infrastructuur geïnstalleerd, is nog alle sturing die je kunt plegen en al het inzicht dat je kunt bieden belegen omdat de gegevens verouderd zijn voordat je ze ziet.

Al met al een goed historisch overzicht van de implementatie van de ov-chipkaart, de controlerende mogelijkheden en de kansen voor de gebruikers.

De vraag is alleen of en wanneer deze dingen verbeterd zullen worden. Er zijn al meerdere fora geweest waar gebruikers hun problemen met de chipkaart mochten aankaarten. Hier en daar zijn er wel dingen verbeterd maar vaak word je gewezen op systeembeperkingen of onderlinge afspraken waardoor dingen niet mogelijk zouden zijn.

Experience Zeeburgereiland

This week I biked past Zeeburgereiland on my bike route from the Eastern Docks to IJburg and all I saw was completely desolation and this billboard. I had wanted to bike along side the IJ but this part of the city is so unfinished larg pieces of it are inaccessible.

This is what it looks like through the fence:
Zeeburgereiland

I completely forgot the text on the billboard and had a hard time finding the place. Google Maps doesn’t even know it yet1. Just look at Street View.

My trusty neighborhood council member Jan-Bert Vroege is usually available to answer these kind of questions for me and he pointed me towards the right site.

Zeeburgereiland

It’s going to be the site of some significant development in the near future. It’s odd that in developing IJburg the city skipped over this part and is only now beginning to fill it in.

The site points to a fantastic concept at the site of the current silo’s to build an art house, playground, museum and restaurant with a fabulous view and attractive position: the Annie M.G. Schmidt house.

Looking forward to this, but curious if the exurbs of the city beyond where I live (Diemen + Bijlmer) will ever be (re)developed or if we’ve forsaken those to become multicultural ghettos:

I biked on to IJburg and large swaths of that area still are empty and being built and filled in. Most people won’t remember how long it took for tram 26 to be extended there or when the first supermarket opened (is there one now even?).

Some nice parts too:
IJburg

Concerning that part of urban development we can learn a lot of the prefab cities being erected in the East (take Dan Hill’s account of New Songdo). I know it takes time to fill up residential units and some amount of organic growth/frontier mentality is good, but is it that hard to have basic amenities in place when the first people arrive there?

  1. Just like it had no clue about IJburg in the beginning. []

Have your Surface

Haven’t got mine yet, but yes they’re Magic Tables.

During the run up to the iPad launch most pundits got into a pissing match of naysaying and detracting from the device. “It’s just a bigger iPhone.”Most of which has by now been disproved.

Like BERG say, it’s a consumer ready, performant, portable version of the Microsoft Surface. If you have ever played with a Surface, you know that it’s a horribly bad and slow experience AND it has a €10k price tag attached. The iPad is a Surface that works for a very broad definition of ‘works’.

Microsoft can go back to the drawing board. Apple ate their lunch.

Online Tuesday – Data is the new Quicksilver

Afgelopen dinsdag gaf ik een presentatie op Online Tuesday over de toekomst van het internet. Ik had me niet geheel beseft dat de brief van de presentaties subtiel verlegd was naar doe een pitch over de toekomst van je bedrijf, maar des te beter eigenlijk.

Ik gaf een praatje dat zijdelings verwant is aan Monster Swell, namelijk de tsunami van Big Data (zie ook een vorige presentatie) die over ons heen gaat spoelen.

Het format van vijf minuten zonder visuele ondersteuning is de puurste presentatie-vorm —en verdraagt daarom geen bullshit of slechte voorbereiding— maar een verhaal over data-visualisatie zonder visuals… dat is toch lastig.

Volgens mij ging het best aardig (ook naar aanleiding van de reacties) en er is een video-registratie van, zie hieronder vanaf tijdsindex 19:08:

Online Tuesday Juni -Spreker 6-10 from Videofix on Vimeo.

Online Tuesday Juni -Spreker 6-10

Een paar takeaways:

Data is het nieuwe kwikzilver.

Alles wordt in de komende vijf jaar volgesensord.

Dutchstats — Your personal Atlas of the Netherlands

Last weekend we released Dutchstats, an online interactive datavisualization of election results and local statistics for Dutch municipalities by Monster Swell, an Amsterdam dataviz agency.

What?

Dutchstats — an application to view Dutch election results and statistics collected by the CBS1 side by side.

http://bit.ly/dutchstats

index.html

A video demo:

Dutchstats from Alper Çugun on Vimeo.

Who?

Dutchstats has been made by Monster Swell with Alper Cugun and Alexander Zeh.

Which data?

The CBS publishes Shapefiles with the boundaries of the municipalities, burroughs and neighborhoods of the Netherlands with a legend of the statistics they bundle. The tools that the CBS themselves provide to view this data are not very user friendly, see both: Statline and CBS in uw buurt.

The election results for the European Elections of 2009 came from nlverkiezingen.com. We entered the results for the 2010 Municipality Elections ourselves. Parliamentary Election results are provided by the Kiesraad (electoral council).

Why?

This project started as a foray into drawing municipal boundaries on the screen. No easy to use tool2 to plot statistics at that level existed yet, so we thought that would be an interesting and useful problem to tackle. After some attempts we created a proof of concept in Processing, but we did not think a Java applet is ‘distributable’ enough. We then rewrote the entire thing in Processing.js.

A logical consequence of having an easy way to draw local statistics was to create a tool to visualize the statistics that were already bundled in the provided Shapefile. We think the result is quite interesting.

Wat is so interesting about it?

There are tons of stories in this data waiting to be told just like there used to be in any old atlas. Instead of paging through the graphics and charts in one of those, Dutchstats allows you to compare statistics for the same area side by side. It makes the social geography that the CBS collects directly tangible with as little jargon as possible.

Some interesting views on the data:
The decimation of VVD and PvdA by LPF in 2002
The dissolution of LPF in 2003
The location of the Dutch Bible Belt
The prevalence of PVV compared to the amount of non-Western immigrants
Crop farms compared to cattle farms

But there are dozens more interesting stories waiting to be told in these numbers and that is exactly what makes them so interesting. You can keep clicking through, changing the selections, viewing local results etc. That is exactly what we think a good datavisualization should provide.

What’s next?

The source code is available on github. An open source release geared towards making it easy to plot your own data on the map —even for non-programmers— is forthcoming. Also we only discovered a more recent Shapefile on the CBS site3 after the public launch of this project. We will integrate that as soon as possible.

Some other stuff we are considering:

  • Speed optimizations, the visualization is near unusable in Firefox. Recent versions of Webkit and especially Chromium perform much better. I would be interested in hearing if this works in IE9 and how it performs.
  • Zooming display, the same statistics are provided on lower levels as well. Adding those shapefiles and enabling drilling down to the very local level could be very interesting.
  • Showing all of the data displays in small multiples.
  • We’re always interested in displaying more data that can be aggregated at the municipal level. Get in touch.
  1. Not the television network, but the Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics. []
  2. GIS tools do not qualify as easy to use. []
  3. Though we had looked for it ourselves several times on that same site. []

Dead trees

I don’t think I disagree with anything Craig Mod writes.

In his: “Books in the age of the iPad” he argues succinctly for the abolishment of most printed books in favor of those that are properly designed for the medium.

I myself am going to get rid of all of my books save the design, poetry and photography ones. Because:

The convenience of digital text — on demand, lightweight (in file size and physicality), searchable — already far trumps that of traditional printed matter.

It’s good that most people haven’t caught on to that yet. It gives me time to get rid of my book collection before the perceived value of printed paper plummets through the floor.

De val uitgelegd

Hier een hele leuke video over de val van het kabinet (via):

De val van het kabinet from twelve o'clock | motion media on Vimeo.

Dit is echt heel leuk. Ik was me er niet van bewust dat we in Nederland dit niveau van grafisch uitleggend werk konden maken (al zijn ze er wel) en ik wist niet dat Uruzgan ons €1 miljard kost.

Één probleem: de video is grafisch sterk, maar slaagt helaas niet in zijn doel. Als je een overzicht wilt zien van de gebeurtenissen die geleid hebben tot de val van het kabinet dan is het ok, maar het wordt niet helemaal duidelijk waarom het kabinet gevallen is. De video gaat te snel en de verschillende gebeurtenissen en data worden een brei van opeenvolging. Het overzicht en de context missen.

Dit frame is één van de betere in de video omdat je tegelijkertijd heden, verleden en toekomst ziet:
De val van het kabinet! Begrijpelijk, Kort & Helder

Het was een stuk beter geweest om altijd iets van context te laten zien of herhaaldelijk een overzicht te geven en dan weer in te zoomen, van macroscoop naar microscoop en weer terug.

Ranking our schools for better effect

Last week we had this piece of news in the Netherlands: “Scholenranglijst van Trouw heeft effect” (School ranking by Dutch newspaper Trouw sorts effect):

Trouw has a database on their website with the statistics from our board of education which they editorialize and republish on their Schoolprestaties site. The news piece reports on research that shows this ranking has a real effect both in prospective school choice and in school improvement.

This week BERG release their Schooloscope (formerly Ashdown) site that makes statistics about school quality accessible. The story about how it works is particularly worth reading. The entire thing is a beautiful work of insight.

The Guardian has a profile of BERG’s work and about Schooloscope and it raises the question if there is no end to the goodness that will come from the 4ip funds.

The Trouw school site we have, though it could have been more beautiful, more legible and more open, does get the job done quite well.

But I’m reminded of the concept we made for a school search engine using government data: Schoolvinder (with many similar goals: to remove jargon and to make school information accessible and beautiful). We applied for a grant to further improve that site, but that was awarded to another party from whom we have not seen any results since.

Elections and Campaign Data Visualization

With the upcoming Dutch elections the campaigns are heating up and we will be allowed to choose our parliamentary representatives yet again. It is interesting to see how statistics and their visualization are used to clarify and position issues in our complex world.

Issues with visualization

You cannot release statistics and visualizations without thinking through the ramifications of these actions. Every non-trivial bit of information has biases and values attached to it. You can never know what will happen, but you can at least think about it.

The other day at the Rotterdam Open Data meeting, someone vehemently defended the point of view that we should not publish data because it could be spun in a way that is harmful to society. A wholly subjective and belittling point of course to which we countered, that unfounded claims can be launched already and without authoritative data sources we do not have a good way of debunking them.

A lot can go wrong when using data visualization, just see this video of a presentation by Alex Lundry which is familiar territory, but is brought nice and quickly:

Or this recent example from a so called Dutch quality newspaper about Greec and other European edging towards the brink of financial ruin spotted by the great Sargasso1:

This is guilty of the fiddling with origins and axis scales that is so common in juicing up statistics for presentation purposes. Other faults from the video: “sin of ommission”, “correlation is not causation”, “pie-charts suck”. Most of this is treated pretty well in Tufte’s Visual Design of Quantitative Information where he calculates the lie factor of faulty infographics.

US Job Losses

Data visualizations —especially charts of statistics— in elections are also nothing new2, but with the increase of open data and data processing tools, we are bound to see more of them coming out and I hope to see more dynamic ones especially.

The Obama Job Chart (below, taken from Creekside Chat) is a very static traditional chart which could have just as easily been punched out of Excel (though the extra visual touches are nice), but the most important part of this chart is how it supports an overall narrative:

I take issue with the poster’s critique3 because the chart clearly says that it shows “Job Loss”and not absolute unemployment. Any turnaround of the economical situation will be necessarily coupled by a trend as displayed in the chart (losses have to edge back to zero before they can become gains). Also the comparison to the amount of money in a wallet does not really work because money spent is an absolute loss, while the amount of people in the job market is a pool which is in flux.

UK Job Losses

The UK will have their General Elections next Thursday. In the run-up to the elections, Russell Davies spotted this nice interactive chart by Labour to clarify how they helped reduce unemployment.

Jobs Interactive Map | The Labour Party

It remains to be seen how far these kind of more technocratic online methods support the narratives and media plays that an election revolves around. It does not look like it has helped Labour that much in their struggle.

Combined Approaches

So how to combine online more mechanical and easy to ignore material with the mass-media appeal of legwork on the campaign trail?

What’s more likely to be pivotal is the canny use of the latter to leverage the former: ensuring that every casual contact goes into a database, every issue raised by a constituent (or inferred from a pattern of facts on the ground) is captured and tracked, everything that shows up in the gillnet of your feeds is exploited for its propaganda or organizational value. —“Harvey Milk, community development and the digital balance sheet” by Adam Greenfield

As suggested by Adam Greenfield, a combination of both may be the best option, but besides the much praised Obama campaign we haven’t seen much successful work along those lines yet and even the Obama grassroots organization has been underutilized since the inauguration.

The Dutch Situation

One question would be: Where is the Dutch job loss chart at. If I can massage the correct statistics from the CBS, I’ll see if I can whip up something.

Many political organizations in the Netherlands, do not have the budget or maturity in web infrastructure to be able to quickly create and deploy bespoke applications that are situated within their workflows and fit within campaign deadlines.

A small but comprehensive overview of online activities for the Dutch general elections can be found on Spotlight Effect (in Dutch) but small really is the operative word. I am aware of a couple more initiatives due to come out but it’s quite meagre.

Also when talking about the overarching themes, I haven’t spotted the ones that our election is supposed to be about yet. Unless it is whether you envision a divided Netherlands where a discontented white proletariat rules over both foreigners and intellectual elite alike or whether you want a whole country governed by sane and rational people.
Issues such as education, technology, healthcare, immigration, urban and ex-urban planning for a decreasing population, our international position, energy and food security and all of those with a vision of at least 10 years into the future are sorely lacking. This is probably because most of the population is too shuttered inside their blocks and suburbs to be able to look over the rim of the nearest enclosing dyke.

Update:
This seems to be the overarching theme of the elections for the PvdA.
Iedereen telt mee

Update:
Alex Lundry notices that the Obama job loss chart is being updated by the Washington Monthly. Here’s the April version:

And here’s the same chart for the Netherlands albeit a lot less granular (if anybody has that data, I’d greatly appreciate it):
Werkloosheid Nederland

  1. To which my snide commentary was that most people going into graphic design don’t do so because they were especially good at maths or statistics in high school. []
  2. I’d love to see a comprehensive annotated overview or even pointers to material. []
  3. In Dutch we would call it: ‘looking for nails in low tide’. []

Table Viewer for Music Hackday

This entire weekend was taken up by Amsterdam Music Hackday for which Alex, Dirk and I had planned to build a prototype version of a surface table projector for music discovery.

The functionality we envision helps ad-hoc groups of people who find themselves in the same location/venue/party to compare their music tastes and see where the overlaps and where the holes are. The table would be a turn-taking jukebox with tangible interactions and nice visuals for all users and spectators.

Easier said than done, of course. We spent a great part of the week and most of the weekend hacking, building, eating, drinking coffee, staying up to the wee hours, literally stabbing ourselves with scalpels, cursing a great deal and drinking whisky to get the thing together, when finally on Sunday in the last hour before the presentation we managed to integrate everything to the level that we could shoot a demo video.

Pictures of the proces and demo videos below:

Real men eat meat!

BENQ

Top view

Point to interface

Last.fm

What we built was just an initial step on the way to the jukebox I described above, but it seemed to look promising enough to net us the first prize from last.fm at Music Hackday for which we were very happy.

We like to thank last.fm, the organizers and the participants of Music Hackday. It was a great event and for us it was a great occasion to finally get this project started.

We will develop the table further and build out the functionality we had envisioned to make it a real locus for social music discovery. It should be hanging in one of our studios soon, so get in touch and visit if you want to try it out.

Obstakels in het werken met open data

Presentatie gegeven over open data en de obstakels waar je in de praktijk mee te maken krijgt. En passant ook een open data maturity model gemaakt wat wel enig hout snijdt.

Dit was leuk om te doen en ik ben benieuwd of Rotterdam snel kan handelen op dit vlak. Zie mijn favorieten op Twitter voor de reacties.

Update:
Rotterdam Open Data, April 21 2010
Nog een foto van het event.

Sea fare

Just saw this picture of the Wellington RFID farecard system at Adam Greenfield’s Flickr stream (CC-by-nc-sa photograph):
Notxtian

It’s called a Snapper card.

Compare this to the London based Oyster card:

And the Hong Kong Octopus card:

This international sea food theme makes me think that we have definitely missed a branding opportunity here (and this for a country of fishermen). Our entire OV-chipkaart system1 has been grossly underdesigned on all fronts, so no surprises there2.

So I’ve got two proposed alternative names for our low countries farecard system:

  • Herring card (Haringkaart)
  • or

  • Mussel card (Mosselkaart)

How do we get this change implemented? And anybody care to mockup a concept?

  1. How stupid is it to put the implementation detail of the ‘chip’ in the name? []
  2. You currently have the messages in the tram: “Don’t forget to check out with your public transport chip card.”These are a bit awkward. []

Municipal boundaries of the Netherlands

Goal

I want to create a simple visualization tool for Processing so I can input a set of values for each Dutch municipality and then color a map based on those values.

This is harder than it seems because there is no convenient source for the cartographic data for the boundaries of the Dutch municipalities. So the first step is to acquire those boundaries.

OSM

This blogpost in Dutch put me on track for this dataset. OpenStreetMap has a pretty complete picture of the Netherlands and they track municipal boundaries under boundary admin_level=8.

The data dump contains all administrative boundaries on several levels and is something of a mess. The informationfreeway link on the blogpost which should generate an OSM file with only the relations with admin_level=8 but that specific API seems to be down. Also the approach of importing the OSM file back into a PostGIS database before rendering anything struck me as somewhat too cumbersome. So an alternative approach was called for.

There are some readily available dumps at CloudMade both with OSM files (format) and Shapefiles for these administrative boundaries. That seemed to be a useful starting point.

An OSM file is just an XML file with series of nodes, ways and relations in it. It is filterable by the generic processing tool Osmosis with the options that I guessed --way-key-value to filter ways with the admin_level tag and --node-key-value to do the same for nodes. Osmosis does not specify anything for relations which I want to preserve to be able to identify each boundary by the name of the municipality.

Having done that, the resulting OSM file needed to be drawn to the screen. I made a simple XML reader in Processing to display the resulting boundaries. The result did not seem to be completely what I wanted both with missing and unlinked geographical features and I think not everything properly labelled. For this particular application a wiki-map does not seem like the most suitable source of data.

CBS

CBS (the Dutch statistics office) also provides a dataset with administrative boundaries of the Netherlands. It is a bit hard to track down on the site and there’s a reference to the Kadaster which isn’t entirely clear, but the generalized Shapefile is workable.

One problem is that Shapefiles are only understood properly by GIS people and there are hardly any libraries for web developers to work with the data format. Sunlight Labs recently released their ClearMaps library to aid developers wanting to work with Shapefiles, which is a big step in the right direction.

Another problem is that the file on the CBS site is from 2006 and that several municipalities have merged/split, so that adds some problems for correlating it to data. And come to think of it, this municipal rejiggering makes any historical data view of the Netherlands a daunting task. Somebody on Wikipedia has generated a similar map of the Netherlands for 2010 supposedly using data from the CBS, but I can’t find that dataset on the site1.

Oddly enough there’s also nothing readily available to draw Shapefiles in Processing. Perusing the forum yields this post which points to Geotools which is a massive set of Java libraries consisting mostly of a huge dependency nightmare mitigated somewhat by Eclipse and Maven.

Geographical data

Viewing the Shapefile in qGIS shows that it does indeed contain the municipal boundaries with correct labeling. Having verified that, we need to extract the geographical data from the file into a format for easier reuse. Linking all the Geotools2 dependencies to my Processing sketch does not seem like an attractive proposition. Using the Geotools quickstart to setup Eclipse to pull in the libraries and run the Java code, did work pretty conveniently.

Poking around the Shapefile with Java and using the very poor javadocs (the User Guide’s usefulness turned out to be extremely limited) and sources posted online that are available of Geotools yielded something worthwhile after a full day’s work. I also found lots of forum posts of very confused people with few replies and little insight to be gleaned from them. This really seems to be an underdeveloped field.

It turns out the Shapefile read with Geotools contains SimpleFeature classes (UML for those, and the Wikipedia lemma for the OpenGIS standard) of which you can call the getDefaultGeometry() methods.

Geotools also provides a default Drawer.java which you can use to display the features (via LiteShapes) in the Shapefile using Java AWT Graphics. This turned out to be useful mainly for debugging purposes and to verify that Geotools does indeed properly read in the Shapefile. Using a GeomCollectionIterator to walk through the points and extract the coordinates that way turned out to be a dead end (especially because I didn’t get the role of the various Transforms).

Another idea was to generate SVG from the Shapefile but the GenerateSVG class did not seem to be included in my library checkout and fiddling with the maven file seemed risky.

Finally the following piece of code yielded for me the two pieces of data I was looking for, the names of the municipalities and the content of the SimpleFeatures as MULTIPOLYGONs.


  String gemShapefile = "/Users/alper/Documents/projects/muniboundaries/cbs/buurt_2008_gen2/gem_2008_gn2.shp";
  File file = new File(gemShapefile);

  FileDataStore store = FileDataStoreFinder.getDataStore(file);
  FeatureSource featureSource = store.getFeatureSource();

  FeatureCollection features = featureSource.getFeatures();
  FeatureIterator iter = features.features();

  int counter = 0;

  PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter(new FileWriter("/tmp/geo.txt"));

  while(iter.hasNext()) {
  	SimpleFeature feature = iter.next();

  	Collection props = feature.getProperties();

  	if (counter > 0) {
  		String gemNaam = "";
  		String geoWKT = "";

    	for (Iterator it = props.iterator(); it.hasNext();) {
		Property property = it.next();

		if (property.getName().getLocalPart().equals("the_geom")) {
			geoWKT = property.getValue().toString();
		}

		if (property.getName().getLocalPart().equals("GM_NAAM")) {
			gemNaam = property.getValue().toString();
		}
	}

    	pw.println(gemNaam + "; " + geoWKT);

    	System.out.println(gemNaam);
  	}

  	counter++;
  }

  pw.close();

The funny thing is every feature has a property “the_geom”which contains the geometry data and its toString() method yields the geometry data as Well-known text. That turned out to be all we needed.

It turns out the coordinates in the Shapefile are in Rijksdriehoekscoördinaten3 which are cartesian coordinates based on a custom projection and associated rectangular grid for the Netherlands4. This is easily verified using this web form to convert a pair back to GPS and looking that up in Google Maps5.

The above code produces lines such as:
Leek; MULTIPOLYGON ( ( (224599.999985 582499.999985, 224999.999985 581299.999985, […] 223366.621185 581866.621185, 223499.999985 581999.999985, 224440.97068499998 582470.485385, 224499.999985 582499.999985, 224599.999985 582499.999985)))

This is a simple list of coordinates that define the boundaries of the polygons. A MULTIPOLYGON contains one or more POLYGONS. A POLYGON is one list of the boundary with zero or more lists defining any holes within that boundary. I figured that out looking at the specification for GeoJSON (same data model, different markup) which is the format I am going to republish this information in.

Drawing

With these coordinates, it became quite easy to write a Processing sketch to draw these boundaries. I looked up a datasource for the last European elections and hooked that up for the colors.

Results of the 2009 elections for European Parliament

Making iterative sketches in Processing with Eclipse is somewhat cumbersome because you need to utilize quite a high level of abstraction if you don’t want your classes to interfere with each other but still Eclipse allows me to work quickly and lets you write Java 1.5 level code against the Processing core.jar (that alone is worth the effort).

I’m going to release a generic Processing sketch where you only need to add a data file with colors or values for each name. Publication as these boundaries as both GeoJSON and SVG is also forthcoming. I’m also looking for the more recent 2010 Shapefile from the CBS with all the current municipal boundaries in it. If there’s demand I can also extract the living quarter and neighborhood level administrative boundaries which are in the other Shapefiles.

Update: Some research shows there’s a very promising avenue to do this stuff by converting the entire Shapefile to GeoJSON as explained in this StackOverflow post and then drawing thath using either ProcessingJS or OpenLayers.

Update: Managed to convert the data to GeoJSON and draw it using ProcessingJS:
Processing the Netherlands

This opens up a ton of possibilities for interactive visualization and sharing. More to follow.

  1. Nor can I find anything else there, but that is a different story. []
  2. Another alternative would have been a Python binding to GDAL/OGR which looked even less tractable. []
  3. Seemingly you can put anything you want in a Shapefile also given the vast diversity in geodetic datums which are in use around the globe. []
  4. This is something I couldn’t figure out anywhere, what the agreement was —if any— for the contents of the coordinates in the Shapefile. My question: “How do I get GPS coordinates from a Shapefile?”did not yield any answers. []
  5. I have the formulas in a dense PDF, but some sample Java code to do the conversion would be very nice. []

Verkiezingsuitslagen Grootste Partijen Gevisualiseerd

Snel een visualisatie in elkaar gedraaid op basis van mijn Europees Parlement visualisatie van vorige week. De huidige verkiezingen voor de gemeenteraad 2010 (klik voor groot):

Grootste landelijke partijen per gemeente genomen waar mogelijk1. Sommige gemeenten doen nu niet mee, zie Wikipedia voor het lijstje en van 22 gemeenten moet de uitslag nog komen.

De kaart met de grootste partijen van de vorige verkiezingen (voor het Europees Parlement in 2009):

Het is lastig vergelijken met de Europese verkiezingen omdat dat een heel ander soort verkiezingen is met een nog lagere opkomst (en zichtbaar meer winst voor het CDA). Wilders deed bij die verkiezingen op een stuk meer plaatsen mee en dat is duidelijk zichtbaar. Je ziet dat de PVV nu vervangen is door de VVD, maar als Wilders in al die gemeenten wel meedeed, had het heel heel anders af kunnen lopen.

Beide plaatjes mogen overgenomen worden onder een Creative Commons Naamsvermeldingslicentie voor Alper Cugun en een link naar http://alper.nl.

Stuur dit door op Twitter!

Update om 02:00. Volgende en laatste update morgenochtend.

Update: Bezig met de laatste ronde invoer en het is zelfs nog wachten op enkele laatste uitslagen die niet op teletekst staan. Daarna misschien ook de gegevens van de vorige gemeenteraadsverkiezingen overnemen omdat dat beter vergelijkt dan de Europese verkiezingen.

Update: Nog steeds aan het wachten op de uitslagen van Geldrop-Mierlo en Lelystad.

Update: Laatste verlate uitslagen ook verwerkt.

Update: NRC heeft ook een verkiezingskaart die er leuk uitziet maar hier en daar wat lastig werkt.

  1. Sommige gemeenten hebben niet eens een landelijke partij in het lijstje staan. Die blijven dan wit. []