Constructed landscape with lightweight architecture from Micro-urbanism: the Maori pā and architecture as a generative landscape by Amanda Yates

What resonated most is a series of Maori design principles shared by Amanda Yates and Shaun Awatere:

1. Kotahitanga – Cohesion and collaboration. Collective cooperative and effective partnerships and collaboration with community.
2. Wairuatanga – Embedded emotion and spirit.  
   Everything should support our spiritual well being and consciousness. Emotional connection with the environment that links people.
3. Manaakitanga – Hospitality and security.
   Embracing and welcoming visitors, and protection and security of community.
4. Whanaugatanga – Participation and membership in the community and social setting
5. Kaitiakitanga – Sustainable resource management. Protection of significant landscape features and natural enviornment.
6. Rangatiratanga – Leadership, identity, self-determination. Community can lead and take responsibility for creating and determining their own future.
7. Matauranga – Knowledge and understanding. Understanding of community history, identities, character.
8. Orangatanga – Maintain health and well being
9. Mauritanga – Essence or life-force of a natural environment. To identify and promote the maintenance or restoration of a mauri (the life force which all objects contain). e.g. rain-tank collection systems, grey-water recycling systems, passive solar design.

In addition to enjoying the presentations, this was the first event I attended with the Livescribe, an amazing pen/paper system that records notes as you take them and allows you to play them back. Both the presentations and my full notes with audio are available online:

• Amanda Yates, registered architect and academic: Micro-urbanism: the Maori pā and architecture as a generative landscape PDF, Livescribe pencast
• Shaun Awatere (Ngati Porou) is a resource economist: Developing Maori urban design principles PDF, Livescribe pencast
• Wiki Walker, Ngati Hine, Manukau City Council Environmental Policy Planner (tangata whenua): Tangata Whenua and the landscape PDF, Livescribe pencast
• Ngarimu Blair, is a Trustee on the Ngati Whatua o Orakei Maori Trust Board: Orakei papakainga PDF, Livescribe pencast

Further reading: Ngā hua papakāinga: Habitation design principles by Shadrach Rolleston and Shaun Awatere

I love Bruce Sterling’s closing talk for Reboot “action” edition conference that took place in Copenhagen on June 26. Bruce lays out his vision for the next ten years of dark euphoria, favela-chic, gothic high tech and stuffed animal frontiers. (His talk references a photoset, studies in atemporality, (featuring examples from Wellington when he was here speaking at Webstock on What comes after Web 2.0). Here’s what really resonated:

Objects are printouts – not treasures, not things to stocpkpile.

Our posessions are frozen social relationships. Think of them as hours of time and volumes of space.

Reassess the objects in your space and time. What is most important?

1. What you use all the time. Get the best possible common everyday objects. Your bed! You’re spending a third of your life in the thing – you should go out and buy the best bed you can get. The sheets, the pillows, they’re pretty high up there too. And a chair.
2. Things that are beautiful
• Is it so beautiful you’re going to show it to your friends?
• Is it on display?
3. Things that have emotional meaning
• Are you going to tell anybody else about it?
• Does it have a narrative?
• Or are you its slave?
4. Tools
• Have high technical standards
• Be very demanding
• Don’t make do with broken stuff

And everything else? (probably 80% of your stuff)?

1. Virtualize it.
2. Store the data.
3. Get rid of it.

I did a big reset one year ago moving from New York to New Zealand, and was surprised by the euphoria of liberation from so much stuff I thought I loved. Below are a few tools and resources that were awesome for virtualizing, storing data and getting rid of my stuff – perhaps they may help when it’s your turn.

For virtualizing books and almost anything with a barcode then managing and visualizing the data, Delicious Library makes it easy and fun. You hold the item’s bar code up to your camera, then see all the data about it. You can even see what the item resells for on Amazon and post it for sale there in a couple of clicks. It’s amazing to see my old library visually on the screen as I once knew it physically and to often be able to access the sections I want to reference through either Google or Amazon book search even though I no longer have the book physically before me.

If you’re in NYC and don’t have time or desire for selling on Amazon, The Strand pays fairly for used books, and Housing Works accepts donations that are tax deductible and for a great cause.

For furniture, electronics, etc, I took photos and made a catalog document linked to a live Google Docs spreadsheet that had up-to-date pricing and availability. Cocktail evenings (needed to empty my liquor cabinet) helped move the goods. Most items sold to friends, friends of friends and then lovely random people through Craigslist who would likely have become dear friends had I stayed. (We have the same taste!)

Purchasers arranged their own pickup/delivery, often after getting quotes from multiple providers through CityMove.

For the bulk of the other stuff that’s not exactly marketable yet still usable, Freecycle connected the stuff with the people who want it. As a safety for moving day, I selected a couple of large furniture items to donate to Housing Works in advance and scheduled a free pickup through them so any last items that didn’t sell could be donated and removed at the same time.

I had been seduced by a terroirist network known as New Zealand Artisan Honey, made up of passionate beekeepers producing honeys in small, quality batches from specific varietal sources among some of New Zealand’s most spectactular locations.

Sadly, most bees and beekeepers are not having such a romantic experience. I had noticed my previous honey brands losing their organic status as the varroa mite has spread south through New Zealand. There is evidence that CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder) has arrived in New Zealand, and it’s likely due to the strong neonicotinoids, a class of systemic insecticides which France, Italy and Switzerland have banned because of its effects on bees.

The tulips are now in full bloom, and the allium bulbs are getting ready to flower. The peony grows noticeably every day. The Northern Mockingbirds that were still feathering their nest over the weekend didn’t sing yesterday, and today the nest was empty. Was it the wisteria leaves and buds unfurling into the nest that disturbed them? My paparazzi habits? GMOs? Something else? The purple kale looks so luscious, I may just have to cut and steam it tomorrow, and use the flowers in a salad.

• Take a Bite out of Climate Change
  Anna Lappe’s new Bite Blog explores climate change through the lens of food with up-to-date info, analysis, interviews with experts in the field, tips on diet choices and actions you can take.
  (tags: climatechange food farming agriculture biotech biofuels hunger meat organic foodindustry)
• Detailed Nomadic Taxonomy
  Paul Saffo’s post on Cyber-Nomads, a functional taxonomy of mobile users, dives more deeply into the metaphors quoted in my New Nomads post (Thanks, Paul!).
  (tags: nomads digitalnomads globalnomads urbannomads taxonomy metaphor astronauts hermitcrabs cybertrekkers)
• Ask Umbra: On Rooftop Gardening
  Are plants grown on NYC rooftop gardens safe to eat? For ye urban container gardeners, the concern is not long-term soil buildup but airborne toxics landing on your plants. Wash the fruits of your rooftop labors and enjoy!
  (tags: gardening urban containergardening ediblegardens gardens pollution food)
• Fring brings VOIP to the iPhone
  I just received my first VOIP call from an iPhone using Fring. It’s f’ing awesome! Now those with opened iPhones can make free calls over wifi using skype and use aim, google talk, twitter, icq, msn messenger, etc…
  (tags: voip iphone)

In Greek mythology, Iris is a goddess who unites sky and sea as a rainbow and unites heaven and earth as a messenger of the Olympian gods. In Tibet, Iris Reticulata is the most glorious flower growing wild on the plateau. At over 14,000 ft above sea level, Iris wastes no energy shooting up stems. Instead, it spreads out its violet and gold treasures as soon as it emerges through the ground.

But Tibet has not seen much “Harmony” in almost sixty years of Chinese occupation. In the words of The Dalai Lama, “genuine harmony must come from the heart, it cannot come from the barrel of a gun.” With six million Tibetans and 1.3 billion Chinese, it’s easy to feel hopeless about the Tibetan plight. But the Tibetan right to automony is a winning cause, and with the whole world watching, Tibet and friends outnumber China 5 to 1.

If you’d like to count with Tibet and the whole world, sign the petition to Chinese President Hu Jintao, requesting restraint and respect for human rights and to open meaningful dialogue with the Dalai Lama. In the words of Mohandas Gandhi, another wise leader through nonviolence,”Whatever you do may seem insignificant to you, but it is most important that you do it.” Or in other words… better to be an Iris than a Cassandra.

Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Speedbird, Urban Computing and its Discontents, and the upcoming The City is Here for You to Use, moderated an excellent panel discussion that included Christian Nold (who we loved at Pop!Tech), Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen Design, and J. Meejin Yoon of MY Studio and Howeler + Yoon Architecture. Here are the notes I took during the talk:

Adam Greenfield’s imagining metropolitan form and experience in the age of ambient informatics. What does it look like after the PC? He’s teaching a course at NYU’s ITP called Urban Computing with Kevin Slavin of Area/Code. They take as an assumption that in the near future, that which will primarily condition choice is not the physical, but a data overlay. What are the qualities of this data-gathering layer?

• embedded in enviornment
• wireless
• imperceptible, small/buried, recedea from consiciousness
• post-GUI
• multiple (tens to hundreds)
• relational
• locative (can locate themselves in space and time)
• situated (specific to places or conditions)

Examples of these technologies:

• GPS and ‘GPS’ – you need to be in sight-lines of 3 satellites for GPS to work. That’s hard to achieve in urban canyons, but ‘GPS’ is an urban substitute that can triangulate location through wifi or mobile phone networks.
• RFID – radio frequency tags like those used in easy pass, transit passes, credit cards, the new U.S. passports
• NFC – Near Field Communication, a short-range wireless communication technology that lets you pay for things with your mobile phone.
  Wifi, Wimax, Wibro bathing cities in open networks
• MEMS – Micro ElectroMechanical Systems like the accelerometers in the iPhone and Nike + iPod.

We now can see tremendous amount of information about cities, patterns of use and visualize them in new ways. Information can be made available locally in a way that it can be acted upon. For example, receiving an alert that says, “Hey! You’re about to enter a high crime/bad air quality area”. The result is a city that responds to the behavior of the people in it in real time.

Christian Nold is interested in embodiment and how we are embodied in the city. He recently had an experiment going through customs where he had to have his fingers scanned, but they were too sweaty for the machine to work from his running to catch a flight. We are encountering all kinds of new systems for dealing with our bodies.

With a promotional image for a lie detector apparatus up on the screen, Nold explained that many of these systems are about control. Our bodies are giving up data to institutions we don’t have control over, and we can’t get the data back. In a lie detector, your words are not trusted; the body’s data is the truth. In Christian Nold’s projects, subjects use a device that is similar in that it uses galvanic skin response (pictured left), but the people control their own data. First the body’s data is measured. Then, by looking at the tracks, the subjects talk about what they were experiencing that caused physical arousal.

When you go from the individual to the aggregate, you start to see some wonderful patterns, which Nold delightfully termed “communal arousal surfaces.” Each city is different.

In Stockport, people were hardly aware that they had a river running through town, since it was covered by a bridge and shopping area that dominates the town. The map also showed that the social heart of the city was still in the old market area.

The San Francisco Emotion Map (see above) featured a lot of people’s memories being embedded in a particular place. Another interesting highlight is murals. People care about and enjoy them, but they don’t show up on any other maps or tourist guides.

His projects are shifting away from art to local town planning and community activism. A recent project included handing out decibel meters to a community concerned with noise from an airport. The government measured acceptable levels of noise, but their information was based on one or two sensors placed on the road intermittently. The situation looks totally different when you base it on real data.

Showing a sensory homunculus (see right), a model of what a man’s body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the brain concerned with its sensory perception, Christian asks us to start thinking in terms of sensory commons rather than public space. Public space no longer exists as interactions become more mediated than ever. How much control do we have? How much agency do we have? (Right now, more than people know.)

Eric Rodenbeck struggled at first to get the display connected and working with his Macbook Pro. This gave Adam an opportunity to point out that these ubiquitous technologies are sold as “seamless” and “perfect.” In the real world, technology breaks constantly, always and reliably. Plan on it. And push back when you see promises of perfection.

Once connected, Eric began explaining that mapping and data visualization is a medium with a wide expressive potential used for all kinds of things, including deception. He used as an example a map of red and blue states in the 2004 U.S. elections. It looks binary and grim with a blue “Baja Canada” and the rest red, showing little hope for a “United” States. But then we look by county, on a color spectrum from Democratic Blue to Republican Red and see that really we’re quite reddish-purple. And when you adjust it to show each county proportional to the population, as in the cartogram above, we see it’s even more mixed and widely democratic.

Roedenbeck’s interested in the idea that data visualization and mapping is the intersection of analysis and spectacle. Spectacle in this case meaning assertive, robust, active, specctacular and exciting. As a medium, data visualization is live, vast and deep. Stamen creates frames and structures that let you drive through data.

Cabspotting.org captures GPS data from Yellow Cab taxis in San Francisco. When looking at the paths, we see their flows defining the streets or arteries of a system that can only be described as a heart. (Pictured above, but watch the time lapse movie for full effect.)

Other projects discussed:

Mapping of development in Plano, TX for Trulia

Crimespotting in Oakland, California illustrates how these are not politically neutral. How public should public information be?

Eric recommends Modest Maps, a free display library for designers and developers who want to use interactive maps in their own projects.

J. Meejin Yoon asks “How do you physicalize ideas?” She’s interested in play – working with our own rules and restrictions. In architecture, the term “play” refers to the gap between two materials.

The defensible dress project was inspired by her experience with commuting in Seoul. Sensors detect someone approaching the wearer and trigger quills made from Flexinol wire to define the wearer’s personal space.

Other projects discussed:

White Noise White Light, an interactive light and sound field created for the 2004 Athens Olympics.

LowRezHiFi, a sidewalk and lobby installation in Washington D.C. with an interactive sound field and transparent field of pixels that displays information and registers movement as you pass by it.

Adam kicked off the discussion following the presentations by pointing out how this is becoming a politically charged issue. Recently, NYC council members drafted legislation requiring anyone who has a detector that measures chemical, biological or radioactive agents to get a license from the police department. This would stifle collection of environmental info vital to common good. The challenge is how to get community gathered data to be taken seriously?

Lots of great questions were asked. If you have answers, get in touch!

• How to get community gathered data to be taken seriously?
• Who owns your GPS trace and photo?
• Are we prepared for openness?
• What is the shape of society after these technologies are embedded?
• How can you get lost?
• If you can’t get lost, how can you ever find yourself?
• What happens if you don’t have access? [Real life example: toilets along Highway 1 in Western Finland are unlocked by sending an SMS message to the number given by the Road Administration.]

In Brixton, Christian Nold’s helping develop Abundance, an urban agriculture project to create a resilient community and social cohesion in the face of climate change and other challenges.

Adam Greenfield spoke of reading The Great Good Place, a book about the informal and social third place after home and work, in Starbucks, the chain inspired by it. Everyone in the place was mediated, either plugged into headphones and a music device or staring into a laptop computer. He used to joke of the need for a chain of cafes called Faraday’s, after the Faraday cage, an enclosure painted to block all electrical signals. It’s not a joke anymore. How do you find a way off the network?

The current attitude towards these technologies is “isn’t it a shame that the rich have access and the poor don’t.” Pretty soon, the measure of grandeur and privilege will be to not have to expose yourself to these networks.

Eric explains how Fundrace.org made public information on people’s political donations along with their addresses easily available, causing neighbors to break out into fights. As problematic as any one data source may be, once you start mapping relations between multiple sources, things start to get troubling. For example, mash Fundrace up with capacitors that measure your treads as you walk and can distinguish individuals, and you can imagine doors may for some people and others won’t know they exist.

Where is the line on what’s acceptable? In South Korea and Japan, we see more acceptance and fewer articulated fears (but few good explanations). One pilot in the U.S. asked kids to wear nametags with RFID. PTA called an urgent meeting and physically removed it from the schools. These are not neutral technologies but “technosocial assemblages” that can’t be decoupled.

And what happens if it all goes away? Adam thinks about Marshall McLuhan’s idea from Understanding Media: Every technological invention or extension is also an amputation. The degree we get used to it is precisely the degree to which we lose our native capabilities.

We have some agency and some responsibility:

• Fight to create lostness.
• Design interventions that return serendipity to people.
• Raise media literacy and awareness of what’s at risk.
• Communicate to elected officials.

N.B. The next event in the series takes place in March, and it looks like a fantastic panel of artists working with biotechnology curated by the fabulous Régine Debatty.

The surreal romance of aristocratic expat Lucy and castaway Jack enchanted me as I strolled through Sydney’s Royal Botanical Gardens in early January, following their love story on a handheld HP GPS device preloaded with Anita Fontaine‘s spooky sweet Ghost Garden, part of the 2008 Sydney Festival. As I traveled through the gardens, certain locations would trigger animated scenes that revealed the story, set in the 1800s. I could feel the past, present and future all melting into one, and I got excited imagining the day when it be easy to create my own site-specific adventures for people to discover as they’re traveling through a space.

That day turned out to be less than a month away! Wherigo is a flexible gaming platform that Garmin is embedding in their new Colorado 400t Handheld GPS unit (Pictured at right. Thanks, Brady!) Wherigo Builder allows anyone to build alternate reality games, tour guides, local reviews, real estate marketing apps, scavenger hunts, pub crawls or Victorian love stories that are site-specific by mapping out zones, creating a story and then sharing it online. (Alternately, you could write it directly in Lua, a programming language whose name means “moon” in Portuguese and is also what World of Warcrafters use to build on top of their platform.) If you have a PocketPC Device, you can download the Wherigo Player and start playing.

Anything similar for the iPhone’s fauxGPS maps or soon to be true GPS?

For now, you can enjoy my Emily Approved Sydney recommendations in Google Maps and in Google Earth.

Kenro Izu: Bhutan, the Sacred Within
November 2, 2007–February 18, 2008
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th Street, New York, NY 10011

What a treat to hear Kenro Izu talk with Owen Flanagan at the Rubin Museum of Art in conjunction with the opening of his exhibition of photographs, “Bhutan: The Sacred Within.” Kenro Izu’s been exploring and photographing sacred sites both natural and manmade for decades. To look at his landscapes of sacred places around the world is to enter them; you can almost smell and taste the air inside the image. In “The Sacred Within,” he turns his lens to the essential element that makes a place sacred: the people that revere it and hold it in their hearts.

Out of all the places he has photographed, Bhutan has especially captivated him, drawing him back six times over six years. Izu writes in the introduction to his accompanying book, Bhutan, “Traveling many years, I have not yet seen a place as peaceful as Bhutan, or a place affecting such a peacefulness within myself. If there is a place indeed named Utopia, this place may come the closest to it.”

Bhutan, known as the “Land of the Thunder Dragon,” is a small independent country of 700,000 people nestled in the Himalayan mountains between China, Tibet and India. What struck him on his first visit was how unique it was among Himalayan lands with its abundance of lush green trees and glacier fed rivers. He was moved by how the high altitude air was unusually moist and dense. And he was struck by how rich the people seemed, which he noted might sound odd considering the average GNP per capita is under US $1000, but he never saw anyone begging for money. Instead, people appeared well fed and well dressed, even happy.

Kenro Izu’s custom-built large format camera on display at Rubin Museum of Art, 2005. Photo by Emily Davidow

Izu travels with a custom-built large-format camera with a 14″ x 20″ negative that captures the density of the air and the quality of light. His large format platinum palladium prints appear illuminated from within, offering a depth that transcends two dimensions. That also makes them an ideal medium for portraits. Why did it take Izu such a long time to shift from the sacred places to the people that make them so? “I am shy of people. Can’t point the camera at them.”

Spontanaeity is another challenge with his turn-of-the-last-century technology. Every picture has to be staged, “like a diorama of a scene.” He described the process of making an image that looks like a candid of two schoolboys walking and looking back at him (Druk #537, Bumthang, Bhutan 2007). He had seen them walking to school near Tamshing Lhakhang in the morning and envisioned the shot, but they were in a rush to get to school, so he set up to meet them after school and take the photograph.

While the images may not be spontaneous, Izu pointed out how un-self-conscious, authentic and neutral his subjects seemed. This neutrality is something Izu aspires to himself, as he repeated in several ways the idea that “I always want to be myself, not bigger or smaller.” To Izu, it seems the Bhutanese have found a middle way between the precious modesty of the Japanese and the super-sized egos of America.

Is this lack of self-consciousness due to inner peace, Buddhist ideas of the self, or freedom from the continuous stream of marketing images in America and Japan (where Izu, now a Brooklyn resident, was born)? Bhutan just launched television and Internet service in 1999, and the Bhutanese are consciously creating media that reflects their values and culture rather than relying on foreign imports. Even the movie theaters are filled with steady streams of Bhutanese feature films. I had hoped we’d get more deeply into this in discussion with Flanagan, a professor of psychology, brain sciences and neurobiology at Duke University, as well as the author of The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World and the paper ‘The Bodhissattva’s Brain: The Neuroscience of Wisdom, Virtue, and Happiness,’ but I’ll have to check those out along with his talks online from the Mind and Reality Symposium to learn more about his thoughts on these issues.

Kenro Izu, Druk # 545 Jambay Lhakhang, Bumthang, Bhutan, 2007, Carbon pigment print, 52 x 36 in.

Izu introduced Bhutan’s progress indicator of GNH (Gross National Happiness), declared more important than GDP (Gross Domestic Product) by King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck as early as 1986. According to the Bhutanese government’s definition, Gross National Happiness depends upon four main pillars: economic self-reliance, environmental stewardship, cultural preservation and good governance.

Cultural preservation refers to the teachings and practice of Buddhism that infuse every aspect of life and value wisdom and compassion*. It also encompasses aesthetic values of beauty and harmony. (China’s a PC, Bhutan is a Mac.) Izu captures many of the Bhutanese traditions in his portraits: the indigenous ceremonial Tsechu masks and costumes, tulkus (reincarnated rinpoches), meditating monks, and families enjoying each other.

Flanagan brought up Aristotle’s observation that if you ask people what is the greatest good, everyone will agree that it is happiness. But if you ask people to define happiness, everyone offers up a different answer. He also noted that while the people in Izu’s portraits looked happy, they weren’t exuding a feeling of “happy happy joy joy” so much as serenity and equanimity. He framed the discussion asking Izu whether it was a real happiness, and if so, what is that happiness?

Izu offered a more personal definition from his guide in Bhutan, along with a lively photo exemplifying it: “three generations under one roof, tea, rice and healthy, enjoying life.” Both Izu and Flanagan seemed wistful about the depth and strength of these familial relationships in contrast to the dispersed nuclear families of contemporary Japan and America. Asked but not answered: Is that the price of modernity? And is what the Bhutanese have impossible in the modern world?

As I viewed Izu’s exhibition, I couldn’t help thinking about the portraits of Edward S. Curtis, a photographer who used similar methods to document Native American people. Curtis set out to catalog their ceremonies, beliefs, daily life and landscapes in twenty volumes of “The North American Indian” before it was too late. Although the conditions of the Bhutanese people in 2007 are vastly different from those of the Native American people of 1907, there are striking visual parallels between the black and white images depicting the spiritual life of both cultures with their exquisite textiles, shamanistic masks, and ritual objects, taken by admiring outsiders. Will Bhutan lose its culture as it opens itself up to global communications and technology, foreign travelers and investment, and new forms of government or can it hold on to its sacred within?

Of course, awareness of both impermanence and the interconnectedness of all things is central to their Buddhist teachings. The last image Izu presented illustrated that with an image of a young girl in a field of cosmos flowers (Druk #444, 2006). He saw this herbaceous perennial in pink, red and white dancing all over the foot of the Himalayan mountains and figured it must be the national flower of Bhutan. What a surprise to learn the species was introduced only 50 years ago by an Irish doctor who brought antibiotics to Bhutan along with a single bag of cosmos flower seeds to remind him of home. He couldn’t have imagined these lovely blossoms would find such an ideal combination of soil and climate in the Himalayas.

Indeed, who can predict what will take root and flourish between the cross-pollination of cultures? May the seeds of GNH — oh, let’s go for GGH (Gross Global Happiness) — take root and blossom in hospitable growing media as people encounter the concept. Izu’s exhibition is a beautiful place to start.

* The finer points of how to manifest GNH are continually unfolding and will be explored at the Third International Conference on Gross National Happiness held in Bangkok, Thailand November 22-28, 2007. The ongoing discussion can be followed at the Centre for Bhutan Studies.