Rethinking the American City: An International Dialogue

8 The Digital City

167 8 8 the DIgItAl CItY MAlcolM Mccollough urBAn coMputing hAS come of age.1 The era of handheld mobile computing brings situated technologies too. Today’s new phenomena of interpersonal navigation, environmental sensing, big data, and grids of smart things have implications at the scale of the city. Recent examples abound: for example, Velib and Zipcar in transportation, Foursquare and Layar in social navigation, Pachube and Sensaris in environmental monitoring. Whether in social, environmental, infrastructural, or political applications, this latest wave of information technologies brings new prospects for participation . Users sometimes even become citizens through acts of tagging, rating, monitoring, sharing, and spontaneous gathering. Yet just thirty years ago, “smart city” meant fashionable dress.2 Just ten years ago, “smart grid” had yet to appear in the mainstream news media.3 This field is new. As urbanists have increasingly noted, the addition of ambient information media transforms the usability of the city.4 A core concept in interaction design, that prominent liberal art of the twenty-first century, usability begins from operation mechanics and form factors, as industrial designers long have known, but then escalates into questions of perception, embodiment , social convenience, and the aesthetics of interface. Whereas formerly such psychological concerns were too easily dismissed by technocentric computer scientists, today the success of smart phones, touch pads, proximity sensors, and all manner of responsive forms means usability might matter to anyone. The city is filling with objects in which computing is but a feature (again, consider a Zipcar, for instance).5 At the foundation of this paradigm shift, the philosophy and psychology of context supplant the exigencies of computation itself (which is ever less costly) as the basis of information-technological experience. This should be of no small interest to architects and urbanists. MALCOLM MCCULLOUGH 168 The philosophical core of contextual awareness begins from the condition of embodiment. The paradigm shift in usability has been from detached computational models of mind toward situational awareness through embodied cognition.6 I will say more of this later, but for now, in brief, this latter term describes our use of physical props, settings, and social configurations as active components of mental processes, especially skilled and habitual processes—that is, the practice of everyday life. This is not the moment to unpack the cognitive science of situated actions, but it is clear that the importance of embodied components of everyday awareness has become increasingly apparent across broad fields of inquiry. For today, information technology expands into many more formats and contexts than ever before. It comes along in your pocket. It covers whole walls. It finds ever more ways to attach to things, like the little panels that now clip to the hoses of gas pumps to provide yet one more spot for advertising. In the case of sensors, tags, or microchips, information technology disappears into things, such as door handles; appears as new street furniture, such as bike rental kiosks; operates building components, such as actuated sunshades; and overlays new citywide grids, as in the dynamic pricing of parking spaces. Scale seems important. Display screens, of which the world gets about a billion more each year, grow both ever smaller and ever larger in size and in their situations. On an airplane, you can now watch fourteen bad movies at once on the backs of the seats in front of you. Almost anywhere, the first reaction to a screen becomes touch, for as embodied cognition research explains so well, touch changes everything. Then, amid the diversification, the proliferation, and the immediacy of all these information formats, the urban citizen’s outlook changes. The more ambient media become, the less any one medium can command attention (much less furnish terms of viewing as a spectacle). The more prospects exist for continual change of attention, the more important it becomes for a citizen, or “urban subject,” to participate actively in an ongoing interest rather than passively tuning out. For the more that mediation augments the world, the greater the risk that tuning out will miss the world itself, and something important with it. DIGITAL CITY 169 inScriBing the city Tagging, a fundamental act in pervasive computing, serves well to illustrate such change. (It also lets us temporarily put aside many larger questions of digital civics, which lie beyond the scope of this essay.) One core concept here, albeit one easy to recite and difficult to define, involves the capacity to write...