Nine residents of North Allston sat down with our staff, experienced the space virtually on both the big screen and their own laptops, and brainstormed how the park could play a role in community life. We asked the residents to pick a theme from among the several that emerged from the formal design process being led by Harvard and the ICON Group. Among these themes were “playful,” “educational,” and “contemplative.”

Because the park is still in the early design phases, we focused on broad strokes rather than specific design, and participants knew we were throwing out ideas, not specific recommendations. Nonetheless, the residents were actively engaged in thinking through how the space might weave into the fabric of the neighborhood, what can realistically fit in the relatively small, L-shaped parcel, and what the community really needs. Among the general ideas were a fitness circuit, ampitheatre-type group space, a covered seating area, and a naturalistic pond.

The outcome of last night’s process will be available to view in Second Life through tomorrow afternoon, when a new community group will come in and do it all again. We’ll be providing Copley-Wolff Design Group, the landscape architects for the park, with these ideas as well as more specific designs later in the summer. If you’re a local constituent of the park, please consider joining us at tomorrow’s brainstorming session:

Harvard Allston Education Portal
175 N. Harvard St
1:30-3:30pm

We’d especially like to thank, among the Hub2 staff, our interpreters — local Allston youth who have been learning more about both the virtual world of Second Life and the real world of park design — who helped residents manipulate their avatars through the virtual space. Our hosts, the Harvard Education Portal, also worked extra-hard to ensure that the computers and network stayed up and running.

I’m not sure if the video of the discussion is going to be available — I’ll link to it if so.

Mixed Realities is an exhibition and symposium that explores the convergence—through cyberspace—of real and synthetic places made possible by computers and networks. Mixed Realities links and overlays the Huret & Spector Gallery (Boston), Turbulence.org, and Ars Virtua (Second Life).

I will be moderating the morning panel on February 8, Real World Implications of Virtual Economies, with panelists Burak Arikan, Drew Harry, Scott Kildall, and Victoria Scott. Virtual economies — and economics in general — are not my strong suit, so I look forward to learning quite a bit from the experience.

Mixed Realities homepage

The Hub2 evening group (that’s the one I teach) is hosting our open house this evening at 7pm EST (4pm SLT). We’ll be showing off our Greenway design system, Second T neighborhood tour creator, and Local Talk diner. Please come by and give us your ideas and feedback to make Boston Island a truly immersive Second Life and Boston experience!

SURL to Boston Island

1. Who has time for a second life?
2. Spatial imagination
3. Virtual imagination
4. Imagining new solutions
5. Net-locality
6. Building new solutions

In other news, we’ve been meeting with City of Boston and Boston Redevelopment folks over the last week, and in that time have come to sharpen our thoughts on how Second Life can foster more deliberative, community-led processes in urban design. While we are not Second Life boosters, at the moment no other tools combine the ability to collaboratively build and inhabit spaces the way SL does. We plan to describe these affordances in our forthcoming article, but one aspect I just started grasping today is the idea not just of net-locality (the extension of places into virtual networks, à la Red Sox Nation) but also of situated presence. That is to say, most design processes result in some kind of virtual fly-through, but “you” take the form of a disembodied camera (often not even under your own control).

By contrast, virtual worlds enable presence, which has implications beyond just, for example, seeing how easy or hard it would be to walk down the street given a particular arrangement of street furniture. It would also allow purpose — the possibility, for example, of situating community participants in particular roles — whether the child trying to get to school or the truck driver attempting to make deliveries. Indeed, in opening the possibility of robust, situated role-playing, such systems could even offer polarized community members to take other points of view — ultimately, a community would care quite a bit about whether trucks are able to make deliveries to their local shops even though they might also fear the noise or potential for accidents.

With any luck, our discussions with the city of Boston will give us a chance to test out these ideas.

Workshop panelist Grace Lim-Tan Keh Buoy has posted photos from our workshop at State of Play V in Singapore. Thanks Grace!

I’m still hoping to acquire some video from the event, which I’ll compress and post as soon as possible.

1. Audio streaming. We couldn’t secure a real-time audio stream, which would have been ideal, but we did OK by routing our audio through voice chat. The problem with this is dropoff, which the listener can override. Or we could have created a group chat, though that can get logistically hairy in realtime. The bigger challenge, it turns out, was getting sound into the computer in the first place (see below).

In the absence of proper audio streaming, Catherine and Aaron engaged in a lot of furious text transcription. Wow.

2. Picture relay. We weren’t video streaming either (which probably wouldn’t have added that much anyway), but we did have someone take photos and quickly upload them into Second Life to display. This is a trick that Aaron’s done a number of times, and I think it helped give participants a feel for what was going on in the room without boring them with zero-action video.

3. Give virtual participants something active to do. As I discussed in my other postmortem post, we created small groups out of the audience and then assigned them all something to do. We treated the Second Life participants as their own group, and this turned out pretty well, I think.

How we could have improved:

1. Ensure and test appropriate hardware. Our microphone sucked, and it severely affected participants’ ability to hear what was going on in the room. Ideally, we needed some kind of multi-mic setup, though such an option wasn’t in our budget. On the flip side, we also had trouble getting sound out of the computer into the room. We had a room mic and amp, but it took just a few seconds too long for us to put it right in front of the laptop’s speaker. Direct output to the speaker system would have been better, if that had been an option (as it would be in most classrooms).

We also failed to test the hardware setup with enough lead time to troubleshoot problems — as Aaron points out, “When a single component was crippled, it had enormous effects on the experience for the participants in Second Life. Also, small and seemingly insignificant issues, such as physical location of the computers can have a huge effect on how things play out.” In our feeble defense, I would point out that this especially hard to do in a hotel setting where not everything is going to be available far in advance for testing. Having a mobile broadcasting suitcase (containing microphones, mixer, mini speakers) would be the ideal solution for those who can afford it.

2. Upgrade our Second Life learning objects. We just didn’t have enough appropriate objects in the space such as discussion logging, whiteboards, etc. That was simply a lack of preparation!

3. Get to the action sooner. We lost a lot of participants early on because there just wasn’t enough for them to do. I’ve sat through enough SL lectures to know that listening to people talk about something somewhere else is just not that exciting. Compounded with technical difficulties, it’s deadly. By the time we got to the group activities we were down to 4 hard-core participants. Next time, we have to move to group activities almost immediately.

We have several goals in offering this class:

1. Examine the intersection among group identity, creation of meaning-space, and civic engagement
2. Test Second Life as a tool to stretch participants’ imagination about spaces and groups
3. Establish the foundation for an ongoing program working with different civic groups across Boston, including youth

Much like CyberOne, there will be a “traditional” class, taught by Eric, and an “open” class, taught by myself. The two classes will run in tandem, with the two groups collaborating on a continuous basis. Here is the description of my class. The flyer explains what the class is about; here is what it is not:

• It is not a class about technology and Second Life, although participants will learn how to use Second Life and other tools.
• It is not a theoretical class about urban design or political sociology, although sound theory underlies much of the work of the class; participants are expected to engage actively with residents of Boston neighborhoods.
• It is not a “check-in/check-out’ class; we want participants to stretch themselves intellectually and socially, and we expect them to make practical use of what they learn in the class with their own constituents.

To make the class accessible to as many Boston organizations and individuals as possible, Emerson has cut the tuition of my class to only $431 for the 12-week course, which includes access to Emerson’s computer labs. It is my hope that we will be able to engage many of the communities and neighborhoods in Boston who are wrestling with issues about civic engagement and public space. Update: This class is now FREE thanks to the financial support of the Boston Redevelopment Authority. Hooray!

Enroll here.

Last semester, Seattle U. Professor of Law Elizabeth Townsend-Gard taught a 1L property class that included a Second Life component, in which students explored virtual property as a way to gain insight into real property. I find this pedagogical tool of using virtual worlds as a cognitive foil for the real one a fascinating way to make use of virtual worlds, and hope to make use of that approach in my soon-to-be-announced class this fall.

Innovator Profile: Prof. Elizabeth Townsend-Gard and Rachel Goda (Law School Innovation blog).