1. Connected objects and the senseable city

Transcription

1 Kristian Kloeckl (University IUAV of Venice) Carlo Ratti (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) 1. Connected objects and the senseable city 1.1 Digital data and real world dynamics Only little more than a decade ago, the internet was in its infancy and Mosaic had just appeared as the first internet browser, the excitement was great about the new perspectives about this digital world. To such an extent that some people believed we would soon be living virtual lives. Gilder proclaimed that "Cities are leftover baggage from the industrial era" and concluded that "we are headed for the death of cities", due to the continued growth of personal computing, telecommunications, and distributed production. At the same time, Negroponte wrote in Being Digital that "[T]he post-information age will remove the limitations of geography. Digital living will include less and less dependence upon being in a specific place at a specific time, and the transmission of place itself will start to become possible." Today we know that things turned out quite differently with cities prospering as never before over the past couple of decades: in 2008 for the first time in history more than half the world s population, 3.3 billion people, lived in urban areas. A number expected to grow up to 5 billion by The digital revolution did not render our cities obsolete but neither did it leave them unaffected. Layers of digital networks have blanketed the physical environment, lending our cities new levels of functionality. Sensors of various kinds and microprocessors are used to manage increasing numbers of city infrastructures, optimizing transportation, monitoring the environment or running security applications. Most noticeably, the explosion in mobile phone use around the globe, reaching more than 3.5 billion cell phones in use worldwide in 2007, rendering them a ubiquitous digital and connected device. Almost everything we do produces some form of digital data: using the Internet in an online café locates you through the WiFi antenna, carrying an online search query or buying products online informs databases of our preferences and interests, talking on the cellphone registers your account information at the nearest telecom tower or switch, using your public transport card to take the underground keeps a record of your travel origin and destination, and riding in a GPS-enabled taxi can produce a precise map of your travel route. These data are generated by network that uses them for their own functioning as a main purpose. They are however also incidental since they are produced and captured in the random everyday acts of urban life, and as such, they reveal the multiple and complex facets of the city and its inhabitants in detail and in real-time. This increasing diffusion of sensors and mobile electronic devices allows for a new approach in the study of the built environment and this assumption is at the basis of the research work at MIT s 1

2 Changing connections SENSEable City Lab. The ways in which we describe and understand the city has been transformed radically together with the instrumentation we use to design them and modify their physical structure. The aim of the group s work is to study these changes that are happening and to anticipate them. The following projects were carried out over the past few years and illustrate different approaches to learning about city dynamics through the analysis of real time data from infrastructural networks and research on how the design of objects in urban contexts can harness this data by conveying it to citizens in meaningful ways. 1.2 WikiCity During the 2006 Architecture Biennale in Venice, the Real Time Rome project developed a then unique approach to real-time urban monitoring, based on the use of anonymous real-time data gathered from cellular phones and GPS devices. The project was able to collect the movement patterns of people and transportation systems, and their spatial and social usage of streets and neighborhoods. In this installation, real time data from urban infrastructure networks was used to visualize city dynamics within an exhibition setting and in a city different from the one where the data was collected. The audience consisted mainly in planners, architects and designers and opportunities clearly emerged as to how to valorize these data visualizations for planning purposes within the urban environment. The subsequent WikiCity project aimed at taking this experience to a next step. WikiCity's aim is to experiment modalities that would allow for similar types of data to be offered directly to the citizens in the very moment they move and act within the urban context. The WikiCity project combines under one common vision the aspects of sensing, time and location based data structuring and the input and output articulation of this data within the context of urban environments. These different fields are combined both to offer new perspectives in analyzing a city s dynamic and for the conception and elaboration of novel tools for citizens to make best use of their environment (Calabrese, Kloeckl, & Ratti, 2007). People moving and acting in a city base their decisions on information that is in most cases not synchronized with the time and place they find themselves in when taking that decision. How often have you arrived at the airport just to find out that your flight has been delayed, been surprised by a traffic jam, found that a product is out of stock or a service operator busy at the moment you needed it. In the same way, a person acting in a city contributes himself to dynamics of which others are not aware of when making their decisions. Looked upon in this way a city resembles what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 1977). The rhizome is a philosophical network structure where every part is necessarily connected with every other part of the system. There are no preferential connections because every connection alters the overall network structure. As a consequence, the rhizome can not be plotted since the plotting action itself is part of the rhizome and thus in the very moment of plotting its structure, the structure changes. The WikiCity project, in a similar way, is concerned with the real time mapping of city dynamics. This mapping however is not limited to representing the city but instead becomes instantly an 2

3 1. Connected objects and the senseable city instrument for city inhabitants to base their actions and decisions upon in a better-informed manner. In this way the real time map changes the city context as well as that altered context changes the real time map accordingly, with the ultimate aim of leading to an overall increased efficiency and sustainability in making use of the city environment. Figure 1.1: WikiCity as connections between the physical and the digital layer of cities. Will such a WikiCity lead to more people attempting to be at the same place at the same time or in an increasing number of different places at different times? Catering for a tool to address such a question means considering whether and how the real time map is capable of communicating different and context based information to users in different circumstances and how people s decisions, that were taken on the basis of the real time information, are fed back into the system itself. The real time control system as a working metaphor In order to identify the functional elements needed to construct the data platform of WikiCity we chose the real-time control system as an analogy to start with. In the past decades, real time control systems have been developed for, and deployed, in a variety of engineering applications. In so doing, they have dramatically increased the efficiency of systems through energy savings, self-organization and repair, regulation of the dynamics, increased robustness and disturbance tolerance. Now: can you have a city that performs as a real time control system? Let us examine the four key 3

4 Changing connections components of a real time control system: 1. entity to be controlled in an environment characterized by uncertainty; 2. sensors able to acquire information about the entity s state in real time; 3. intelligence capable of evaluating system performance against desired outcomes; 4. physical actuators able to act upon the system to realize the control strategy. A city certainly fits the definition of point 1. Point 2 does not seem to pose particular problems: today s deployment of a range of remote sensors in urban areas allows for unprecedented data collection and analysis. As an example, the Real Time Rome project used mobile phones and GPS devices to collect the movement patterns of people and transportation systems, and their spatial and social usage of streets and neighborhoods. Information regarding further aspects are already collected continuously by distinct computing systems that track product and service availability, environmental values, climatic conditions, acoustic values, events, What about points 3 and 4? How to actuate the city? Although the city already contains several classes of actuators such as traffic lights and remotely updated street signage, their range of use is currently limited. A much more flexible actuator would be the city s own inhabitants: they represent a distributed actuation system in which each person pursues his individual interest in cooperation and competition with others, with the overall behavior of the system governed by the interaction between individuals. People can also clearly form part of the overall intelligence of the control system. Towards the above goal, the WikiCity project can be thought of as adding further, interactionoriented layers to a real-time map of the city and making location and time-sensitive information accessible to users, allowing them full control of the database, onto which they can upload and download data. In this way, these tools enable people to become distributed intelligent actuators and thus became prime actors themselves in improving the efficiency of urban systems. Time value A key characteristic of WikiCity is the circulation of information on a real time basis. It seems important to emphasize the interpretation of real time we have decided to adopt in order to clarify the use of the term and as a consequence the scope of its implication. Often, the term real time relates to a system in which data is processed within a small fraction of time, a sensor that returns a measurement as a signal in the fraction of a second for example. The difficulty with this definition is that it does not provide a relation of the time intervals in question and this makes it difficult to judge any given system as to whether it is or it is not real time. A more useful definition is the one which refers to real time as the actual time during which a process or event occurs (Soanes & Hawker, 2008). Consequently a real time process implies that there is a deadline before which a given data is useful to the system while that same data is not useful or even destructive to the system thereafter. While the deadline refers to a process, identifying the usefulness of respecting such a process deadline implies the existence of a higher level mission. Considering now that it is evidently this mission that defines the parameters of the deadline we end up with an idea of real time in which there is no stringent necessity to speed up data transfer to arbitrarily defined very fast limits but rather to identify reasonable deadlines for data-transmission that are related to specific missions. 4

5 1. Connected objects and the senseable city Let us consider some examples to illustrate what this implies for WikiCity and it being positioned within the framework of real time systems. When setting up the data integration for the public transport vehicle position for the WikiCity Rome project (a first partial implementation of WikiCity described below) we had initially arranged for a location data feed in 5-minute intervals. Visualizing in this way the position of busses around the city gives certainly a good overall impression of the distribution of busses around the city throughout the day. In fact during the previous Real Time Rome project (see Calabrese Ratti, 2006 and such a time interval was perfectly sufficient to overlay the information with the cellphone activity that occurred at the same time to pose planning questions related to how transport lines work regarding people s aggregation. In WikiCity Rome instead, our aim was to turn the visualization into an instrument for citizens in the city while the information is being processed and thus suggested that people could identify when a bus was about to pass by a stop nearby their location. Seeing a busses' location of five minutes ago is clearly a case in which such an information cannot be considered real time anymore, it has passed its deadline of usefulness and the real time system has failed to deliver information on-time to accomplish the mission which in this case is catching the bus. On the other hand, when we consider information about upcoming, starting and running events displayed on a map at their relevant location, it is clear that we must opt to visualize this data some minutes before the event start (in order for people to be able to attend the event); however the deadline for this visualization of the event is less important, because the criticalness of displaying that the event is ongoing can be considered decreasing as the event approaches its end for many missions. A first implementation: WikiCity Rome The approach chosen to developing WikiCity is of a bottom-up kind, which implies that the overall structure is created stepwise through implementations on a reduced scale. In a similar way the aspect of trust related to data necessarily needs to be approached gradually and in the perspective of an effort that combines traditional elements of trust with novel ones as outlined above. A first step therefore saw the working together with established and publicly certified partners such as entities involved in telecommunication, yellow pages services, satellite imaging, public transport and newspaper publishing in order to establish gradually a range of different data-sets that can be combined on the WikiCity platform. As next steps, the aim is to enlarge this base group of know-how and content providers as well as opening up the system gradually for users to have direct input and output access on the platform itself. A first implementation of the WikiCity concept was presented in Rome, Italy during the Notte Bianca (White Night, on September 8, This demonstrator (see comprised the presentation, on a big screen in a major square of Rome and on the web through a web applet, of real-time population distribution by the use of cell phone data, the location of buses and trains, real time news feeds from a main Italian newspaper, and its mapping to certain events happening in the city. 5

6 Changing connections Figure 1.2: Photos from the WikiCity Rome implementation during the Notte Bianca 2007 in Rome. The WikiCity Rome project, in occasion of the Notte Bianca in Rome on September 8th 2007, has been an opportunity to present a first glimpse of the more comprehensive WikiCity project to the public. This first implementation allows people access to the real time data on dynamics that occur in the very place and moment they find themselves in, creating the intriguing situation that the map is drawn on the basis of dynamic elements of which the map itself is an active part. How do people react towards this new perspective upon their own city while they are determining the city s very own dynamic? and How does having access to real time data in the context of possible action alter the process of decision making in how to go about different activities? are our guiding research questions. 6

7 1. Connected objects and the senseable city Figure 1.3: WikiCity Rome interface used for a 10x5 meter projection in a public square in Rome. The overall WikiCity research program considers such questions in a larger context that includes the active uploading of information by citizens, local authorities and businesses regarding an ever increasing field of data; an elaborate approach to semantic data structures to enable novel ways of querying the data and a rich array of multimodal access interfaces for users to interact with the data in a meaningful way. 1.3 NYTE - New York Talk Exchange Real Time Rome and the WikiCity project have explored the impact of real time data visualization at the scale of a city after a series of previous experimentations limited to the smaller scale environment of the university campus of MIT in Cambridge (MA). Following the invitation of Paola Antonelli at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York to participate with a past project at the 2008 Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition, we proposed to initiate a new research undertaking to be exhibited in that occasion. Instead of focusing on digital traces of urban activities and dynamics within one single city we wanted to explore how data from technology networks could be used to reflect the connectedness between cities at a global scale. What better network to consider than that of telecommunications and what better city to consider for its global connections such as New York. These were the basic assumptions for what turned into the NYTE New York Talk Exchange project presented at MoMA in February NYTE is composed of three data visualizations of which each reflects on a different aspect of telecommunication flows between New York with the rest of the world in order to answer the following questions: How does the city of New York connect to other cities around the world? With which cities does New York have the strongest ties? How do these relationships shift with time? And, how does the rest of the world reach into the neighborhoods of New York? Globe Encounters visualizes in real time the volumes of Internet data flowing between New York and cities around the world. It represents the continuous flow of IP data going through the New York backbone via the trajectories of data packets traveling between cities on a 3-D representation of a spinning globe. The trajectories glow more or less according to the amount of data being exchanged between New York and other cities. In this way, this visualization shows New York's global connections to the world, illustrating globalization as it happens. Because the IP data is updated continuously, it is immediately observable how the fountain of data flowing into and out of New York changes over time and thus where New York s connectivity is oriented during different times of the day. 7

8 Changing connections Figure 1.1: Globe Encounters visualization. World within New York zooms inside New York City's five boroughs and explores how global connections vary from neighborhood to neighborhood, illustrating what can be described as a "globalization from the bottom." It shows how different neighborhoods reach out to the rest of the world via the AT&T telephone network. The city is divided into a grid of square pixels where each pixel is colored according to the regions of the world wherein the top connecting cities are located. The widths of the color bars represent the proportion of calls exchanged with each neighborhood. Encoded within each pixel is also a list of the first ranking world cities that account for 70% of the communications with that particular area of New York. This representation allows for a detailed reading of each particular area of the city and provides a sense of the patterns of connections that exist throughout the city. For example, areas colored green reveal patterns of calls exchanged with South America, primarily clustered around upper Manhattan and the Bronx. Being able to obtain detailed, neighborhood- level data, which goes further than taking the entire city as its unit of analysis, reveals great variation between and within boroughs in the city s connections to the rest of the world via its telecommunications infrastructure. While we all know that New York has strong connections with London, this data reveals that the city is also tied to Toronto, Kingston and Seoul. 8

9 1. Connected objects and the senseable city Figure 1.2: World within New York visualization. Pulse of the Planet looks at how time zones influence the communications patterns between New York City and cities around the world. It interprets international long-distance telephone calls going into and out of New York over the twenty-four hours in a day by shrinking the areas of the world with fewer calls and expanding the areas of the world with a greater number of calls. This visualization aggregates phone calls between New York City and 255 countries around the world. By illustrating the change in volume of international voice calls over the twenty-four hours in a day, we can examine how time zones influence communications patterns from west to east and north to south. Areas of the world receiving and making fewer phone calls shrink while areas experiencing a greater amount of voice call activity expand. In the past such distortions of geographic maps have been widely used to illustrate historic data such as past GDP values together with vectorial maps. It has been particularly fascinating to see this visualization animate a satellite image (Robinson map projection) on the basis of a real time feed of data. 9

10 Changing connections Figure 1.3: Pulse of the Planet visualization. These first visualizations done specifically for the MoMA exhibition have only been the start for a more comprehensive research effort aimed at better understanding the potential that such data visualizations of interurban city connections might have both for planning as well as service and product design purposes. To give an example of the potential relevance of the data involved, however, it is useful to briefly mention one particularly surprising detail that the visualization process let emerge: In an early phase of verifying the data to better understand the integrity of formatting and elaboration techniques applied and possible aspects to illustrate, some basic charts were generated from the data that illustrated intensities of connections between New York and non-us countries. A surprising element in one of the first analysis was that communication between the New York borough Queens and the country Guyana made up 7 percent of all telephone calls of that borough. While at first this result created confusion and suspicion concerning the data's attendibility, further investigation revealed that despite of a total population of only roughly inhabitants, Guyana ranks fourth in the list of foreign born residents in New York according to the year 2000 census data of the New York City Department of City Planning, and that about half of the New York resident Guyanese do in fact live in Queens. 10

11 1. Connected objects and the senseable city 1.4 Trash Track The two previously presented projects focus on considering digital data from urban networks to better understand how people live the city and to subsequently transform this data, and the knowledge generated from it, into a basis for more synchronized planning actions and for the design of products and services. The following research project which is still in progress instead focuses on the objects that populate our cities and it does that by focusing on an extreme state of the life cycle of these objects: their disposal. The tracking and monitoring of the state and movement of objects and artifacts has reached extremely high levels of maturity in the field of distributive logistics. ID tagging and fleet management technologies enable the permanent locating of objects and their parts and this is commonly applied the life cycle stages covering production and distribution. Surprisingly little of this competence is yet implemented beyond the moment when a product reaches its end user and during the then subsequent phases of product usage until disposal. It is this last critical phase of the life of products that the Trash Track project takes as a starting point for investigation. Trash Track is inspired by the NYC Green Initiative ( which aims to increase the rate of waste recycling in the city to almost 100% by This is an ambitious goal, as today s recycling systems are far from optimized. In New York, only 34% of waste is currently diverted from landfills for recycling (Ellick, 2008). In trying to fill this gap between urban reality and urban vision we ask, how can pervasive technologies help expose the challenges of waste management and sustainability? And how can we suggest a future scenario where the same pervasive technologies can make 100% recycling a reality? Trash Track will tag different types of waste and follow these through the city s waste management system to reveal the final journey of our everyday objects. 11

12 Changing connections Figure 1.1: Trash Track project set up diagram. Such a project relies on the development of smart tags to be attached to different types of garbage in order to track in real time each piece of waste as it traverses the city s waste disposal system. The goal of Trash Track is to reveal this process and highlight potential inefficiencies in today s recycling and sanitation systems. Trash Track aims to involve people from all five boroughs of the New York city in applying thousands of active wireless location tags (based on mobile phone technology) on different types of waste products. The product range may include old computers, analog TVs, cereal boxes, glass containers, plastic bottles, and clothing. Technological waste is of particular interest to the project as it is increasingly posing an environmental challenge. The journey of the tagged objects would be triangulated through the signals which will be emitted by the smart tags to capture the spatial coordinates and time stamps for each piece of garbage at regular intervals. The tags would also have a 3-axis accelerometer add-on that will provide a tangible and fine-grained dimension to each object s end-of-life journey. In this way, the tags will provide time and location information of disposed items as well as allow for the creation of a database enabling better consumer information about the environmental costs and the embodied energy of the products they are buying and throwing away. In this way, a high-tech application is combined with a low-tech everyday human activity such as waste disposal. By tracking garbage it should be possible to gain a deeper understanding and create a sense of responsibility for things that tend to be forgotten after they are abandoned in the waste chain. Trash Track helps face the consequences of our actions, helping citizens in in making more informed and sustainable decisions regarding the consumption and disposal of objects. This approach to utilizing pervasive technology opens up the possibility to effectively demonstrate a critical facet of a nearing vision - that of an Internet of things that allows for managing the environmental costs energy consumption of ob- 12

13 1. Connected objects and the senseable city jects from production to consumption to end-of-life. 1.5 Connected objects and the internet of things As the Trash Track project suggests, taking the real time mapping of urban dynamics to a finer granularity brings us to the consideration of not only people and means of transport but the mapping of objects in general. So far we have been considering mainly one typology of objects for this purpose: cellphones. However, already considering in the context of WikiCity the possibility of real time mapping of various types of objects opens up interesting possibilities. When considering the sharing or rental of products for example (car sharing is a prominent and by now increasingly well established example but consider also do-it-yourself tools, sports equipment, ) knowing the location and state of a product potentially increases by far the efficiency in which such a product can be put to use by a large user group and at the same time addresses issues of maintenance that may arise from such an intense usage. Products and services can be supplied to who needs them in that place and in that moment if their location, availability and condition is known in real time which enables the creation of such a systems of dynamic resource allocation for end users within the urban context. As mentioned above, this has been done for a long time in the field of supply chain logistics and an object s position can be identified throughout entire supply chains often across large parts of the globe and this has lead to vast increases in the way that resources are used by companies throughout the production and distribution processes. How these systems might be useful models for real time demand responsive product and service supply schemes in an urban context is a still open question to be addressed fully. Especially this last consideration of directions towards which to take WikiCity brings up very clearly the critical issues involved in this type of project: privacy and control. Mapping the status and location of people and objects in real time brings up the question as to what extend we feel that this might have implications for an individuals concern about reserving his privacy. Using a non-connected bus with a generic paper ticket is in fact something different than taking a bus whose position is tracked and an electronic ticket which feeds into a system the users identification. It alters both, the visibility of that specific person to a system that can technically be read by other systems and individuals and at the same it alters the potential of service improvements for the specific user and for the overall transport system. A critical consideration comes from looking at the example of the supply chain management mentioned above. Thomas Friedman illustrates in The world is flat (Friedman, 2007, p. 584) how all the thousands of parts of his Dell Laptop have come together during production on the basis of a sophisticated globalized supply chain management and points out how a temporary shortage in the supply of one component such as a 40-gigabyte hard drive leads to an immediate relay to the marketing department which offers a 60-gigabyte hard drive for the same price over the next 2 hours. Active demand shaping is the term used for such a process enabled by the tight tracking of status and location (availability for production in this case) in the production realm. How would this dynamic translate into the urban context and citizens moving within and making use of their city? A crucial aspect of further development in this area will have to be focused on how to ensure that the 13

14 Changing connections technology of real time location based mapping remains focused on providing better information for people to base their decisions on instead of formulating decisions for the people. Taking any decision is based on knowledge and insight in the context in question. The better a situation and the actual dynamics in place are known, the better one is able to interact in an effective way with that situation and open up at best the implicit potential of that circumstance. Understanding urban dynamics with the help of digital technologies that enable real time and location based information is a powerful instrument to support just that and it will be exciting to see how this tool can be used in constructive and inclusive ways for the benefit of our cites and their inhabitants. 1.6 Bibliography Bassoli A., Brewer J., Martin K., Dourish P., Mainwaring S. (2007). Underground Aesthetics: Rethinking Urban Computing, IEEE Pervasive Computing, 6(3), Berners-Lee T., Hendler J., Lassila O., (2001). The Semantic Web, Scientific American, May. Biggs, P. & Srivastava, L. (2005). ITU Internet reports : the Internet of things (ITU internet reports ; 7th). Geneva: International Telecommunication Union. Calabrese, Francesco, Kloeckl, Kristian, and Ratti, Carlo. Wikicity: Real-Time Location-Sensitive Tools for the City. IEEE Pervasive Computing, Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems 6, no. 3 (2007): Calabrese F., Ratti C., (2006). Real Time Rome, Networks and Communication studies, vol.20, n.3/4. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Rizoma. Parma-Luca: Pratiche Editrice, Ellick, Adam B. Houston Resists Recycling. New York Times, Friedman, Thomas L. The World is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. Picador, Soanes, Catherine, and Sara Hawker. Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English. [Updated] 3rd rev. ed ed. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, Sterling, B. (2005). Shaping Things (Mediaworks Pamphlets). The MIT Press. 14