Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2008

Diigo Bookmarks 08/05/2008 (p.m.)

• Technology Review: 3-D Printing for the Masses

  From p.2 of this article:
  QUOTE
  “Ultimately, I think people will have these [3-D rapid prototyping] printers at home,” says Lipson. The idea is that people will pay a nominal amount for blueprints and then download them, in much the same way that music is shared over the Internet now, he says.
  UNQUOTE

  Exciting, especially in relation to Larry Lessig’s REMIX ideas — see his TED presentation, 11/07, where he talks about culture getting the creative remix treatment. Having RPT technology enter the home-use market means manufacturing will get that same treatment. Interesting days ahead…

  tags: mit_techreview, rapid_prototyping, 3-d_modeling, 3-d_printing, remix_culture, shapeways

• Pattern Recognition: Latest Trends (July 08) | PSFK - Trends, Ideas & Inspiration

  PSFK’s round-up of trends (recent, 2008). Top of the heap in the list: lists, aka data (how to sort, how to represent, how to use); next, urbanism (varieties).

  tags: psfk, trends, 2008

• San Francisco & Entrepeneurialism | Marktd

  I watched this video a couple of days ago (via PSFK’s Twitter feed), and loved the emphases brought to light by the interviews.

  - Entrepreneurs liked the density of the city — the ability to encounter colleagues by chance, run into folks, rub shoulders;
  - Some talked about liking the “small” aspects of San Francisco: that there isn’t *so* much going on to distract one’s attention from the tasks (work) at hand

  I thought that latter point was kind of intriguing, something to remember when someone once again goes off on how it’s such a bad thing that *this* isn’t as happening a place as NYC or Toronto.

  tags: entrepeneurialism, psfk, cities, san_francisco, socialnetworks

Douglas Magazine in Victoria: letter to the editor

I bought a copy of Douglas Magazine yesterday — it’s a slim publication, but full of interesting articles relating to Victoria’s economy.  Too bad it’s not online, but maybe one day?

The current July/August issue includes a useful article by Dan Gunn, “Growing the tech talent pool,” which made me want to write a letter to the editor in response.  I wrote:

I enjoyed Dan Gunn’s article, “Growing the tech talent pool,” (July/August ‘08), and found it a good complement to Ken Stratford’s “Owning your own business,” which deftly busted some Victoria economy myths.

Gunn observed that our technology sector has to grow and expand, and suggested several ways we can plan for its future growth.  He also noted that “Greater Victoria has a very tight-knit technology community.”  Let’s not forget that “tight-knit” often also means “insular” or “locked in silos,” a condition that’s anathema to innovation.

Hence I feel prompted to suggest another way to plan for tech’s future growth: encourage synergistic cross-pollination between the various industries.  Propagate the knowledge that technology is part of the “creative cities industry,” which includes not just artists, marketers, or creative urbanists, but also technologists, coders, entrepreneurs — in a word: innovators.  Spread the word that innovation and entrepreneurship add value to a city’s economy, and good ideas emerge when folks rub up against one another rather than staying within a tightly-knit tribe.

Douglas Magazine helps get those ideas out there, as do specific events.

For an additional example of how events play a role in connecting people and ideas, recall last April’s first-ever DemoCamp Victoria (and we’re planning a second one for Autumn), or take a look at events like Pecha Kucha (started in Japan, now world-wide, including Vancouver).

We have so much potential here — and if we can work to break down the silos and get more interactive (literally, with one another), we’ll be hopping.  Everyone I talk to in the arts and in tech wants to see this happen, and wants additional platforms for connecting with other people.  Geographically, we might be an island, but with technology and talented people, we don’t have to be on islands creatively.

Diigo Bookmarks 05/27/2008 (a.m.)

• Prefab-ulous: New Development in England Goes Up Green — and Fast

  Brief article by Andrew Blum about Oxley Woods, a development of “90 eco-friendly homes, with 55 more planned to fill its seven acres.” The key aspect? They’re all pre-fab, relatively cheap to build, can be built quickly, and have in-built green features.

  If Canada had a federal housing plan/ strategy, this would be something the Feds (and the Province) could take a closer look at. It sounds like it could be a reasonable (if partial) solution to our affordable housing crisis.

  tags: andrew_blum, wired_magazine, prefab, green_buildings, green_technologies, oxley_woods, affordable_housing

• “L.A. vision: a towering sign,” by David Zahniser (LA Times) - Astani Enterprises Inc - Annotated

  File this under “life imitates art”? There’s a fascinating battle happening in LA over whether or not Sonny Astani, businessman and developer, should be permitted to install a new kind of LED-generated image, 12 stories above the street and 14 stories tall, on the side of his 33-story condo building currently under construction in downtown LA.

  The inspiration? Opening scenes in Blade Runner of downtown LA, showing “a skyscraper-sized advertisement portraying a Japanese woman smiling before popping a snack into her mouth. Astani says an image, such as that of a flying sea gull, could now even travel from one building to the next.”

  I have to admit this sounds really cool, but I can see why many factions in LA would oppose this, too. We’re all familiar with the really bright illuminated advertisements — even Victoria has a small version of one, installed outside the arena on Blanshard at Caledonia. It’s bright, too bright. But Astani proposes a much more modulated, artistic, and dimmed level of lighting. If the images could look as subtle — yet powerful — as Blade Runner’s, it could work, but there’s no garantee, that if permitted, subsequent developers would follow in that “artistic” style.

  Another aspect is this: the proposal, if it’s art, also calls into question just how intrusive public art should be in public space. Does it have a right to be so intrusive as to be impossible to ignore? Can I, as a citizen, be obliged to register public art — and admittedly, it would be impossible not to register this project?

  Is part of what captures my attention/ imagination regarding this project its uncanny fusion of subtlety and assault, packaged as visual stimulus?

  Another question: is this an art form that expresses a corporate and anti-pedestrian city (”…neighborhood anchored by Staples Center and L.A. Live, the hotel and entertainment complex that includes the recently opened Nokia Theatre”), fitting for LA where people don’t walk anyway (but just wait: it’ll show up soon enough on the very very pedestrian-friendly Las Vegas Strip)? I’m thinking of this in terms of Christopher Hume’s writings on Toronto, and the Leslie big box/ corporate redevelopment plans, which he has characterized (rightly, imo) as being anti-pedestrian and therefore anti-urban, too. But could anyone argue that LA is in any way anti-urban? No. So is this visual art / visual stimulus for a different kind of urbanity?

  tags: astani, advertising, billboards, outdoor_installations, public_art, public_space, los_angeles

• “The Web and Beyond: Mobility (1) - Adam Greenfield” - The Mobile City » Blog Archive » - Annotated

  Michiel de Lange reports on the CHI conference “The Web and Beyond: Mobility” in Amsterdam on 5/22/08, featuring Adam Greenfield (Everyware); Jyri Engeström (Jaiku); Ben Cerveny (Playground foundation, Flickr); Christian Lindholm (Fjord, Nokia). In this post, he focuses on Greenfield’s presentation. A key aspect that struck me was this observation by Greenfield: that ubicom / ubiquitous computing creates a new level of “ambient informatics,” and “information processing dissolves into behavior.” Greenfield’s example is the seemingly choreographed swish of a public transit user who swings her purse in front of the transit card reader, never skipping a beat, but shaped indelibly by the technology into certain movements.

  tags: adam_greenfield, mobile_city, ubiquitous, ubicom, technology

Diigo Bookmarks 05/24/2008 (a.m.)

• Transmaterial 2: To Redefine Our Physical Environment - PingMag - The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things” - Annotated

  PingMag interview with Blaine Brownell, architect and sustainable materials researcher, whose focus is on green building.

  “From repurposed materials that act as surrogates, to recombinant ones that fuse several materials into a hybrid, making them stronger and more effective — Blaine points us to products that might shape our physical environment in the future.”

  Materials discussed include self-healing polymers inspired by biological systems, which can automatically heal cracks in buildings, for example.

  The article includes many other photographs / examples with descriptions of weird and wonderful bioneered and sustainable building materials.

  tags: pingmag, transmaterial, bioneering, biomimicry, architecture, technology, blaine_brownell, sustainable_materials

Reading Fred Wilson on the hyperlocal

I started reading Fred Wilson back in January when one of outside.in’s blog posts referenced Wilson’s entry, Rethinking The Local Paper. Wilson is a NYC-based venture capitalist/ investor who funds start-ups related to new media, social networking, online technologies, …that sort of thing. He’s also quite brilliant, blogs (A VC - Musings of a VC in NYC) regularly, and has all the relevant “social media” accounts (and uses them to learn things).

In his January post on Rethinking The Local Paper, he wrote about his passion for the hyperlocal, which immediately hooked me. My interests in urbanism, architecture, mobile media, locative media, social media — all that stuff — collide at the local level. I love how these things are creating whole ecosystems, webs of interrelated dependencies: economies. In that entry he wrote:

In fact, the first thing we all need to understand about “hyperlocal” is that this is going to be a long slog. It’s simple enough to put up a search field and ask for a neighborhood name or zip code and return a result. outside.in has been doing that for over a year now. (…) …the results are not that compelling. YET.

The thing that has to happen and will happen, I just don’t know when, is that we are going to program our community newspapers ourselves. (…)

But there just aren’t that many people producing hyperlocal content in a form that is organizable into a new version of a community newspaper. Sure there are many people posting photos and more and more of them will get a geotag as we get gps cameras and better web/camera integration. (…) [but:] Where is the relevance?

The people who need to produce the content are the ones who care about the content (the local events), but how do you make that production compelling to them? As Wilson wrote, “there isn’t enough of an incentive to produce hyperlocal content.”

What could help push an incentive along is …well, money. He gets into some detail in the rest of that entry (so click through to read). It could happen, basically, if the local producer could make some revenue from producing (tall order), but the way he describes it, it’s not impossible. His bet is on the local papers, provided they embrace the idea that they can be platforms for local content:

…this is a collaborative effort. We need everyone and everything we can throw at this problem to make this happen. We need every newspaper in the country to embrace platforms like outside.in and everyblock and showcase their content on the newspaper’s pages. We need to find these local voices and amplify them. And we need to attract more of them. And we need to monetize them for their efforts.

I’m not holding my breath on the local papers here, and would like to pursue some other ideas myself. But that’s all cool, because as Wilson says, it’s going to be a multi-pronged and collaborative effort and “we need everyone and everything we can throw at this problem to make this happen.”

The other day he posted another fascinating idea I’d like to see explored here in a hyperlocal way.  This one involves Twitter. Like about a bazillion other people, I have a Twitter account (I actually opened it just a couple of days before “discovering” Fred Wilson back in January) — but then I let it sit there, “following” no one and being “followed” by none and tweeting nary a note. Frankly, having a Twitter account felt like having some weird virtual Tamagotchi pest, er, I mean pet, that required my ministrations. And I was unwilling to give them. Twittering seemed like a really stupid idea, so I let the account sit idle.

However, after DemoCamp Victoria01, I saw that “tweets” could be interesting from a local perspective, in terms of strengthening connections (and conversations) with other people here. So I tentatively began “following” some Victoria-based folks, which soon expanded to some regional friends, and then naturally had to include a few far-flung geniuses I can’t resist.

But note: for now I’m still keeping my “following” list really really tiny — trying to resist the lure of reading an endless stream of conversation between and with people I feel I have something in common with.  Naturally [sic!], this pristine state won’t last. Promiscuity, linky love, and webbiness is all part and parcel of development online, including of course the development of co-developments, characterized by connections, and things differentiating out from previous …well, differentiations.

Which brings me back to Fred Wilson, who twitters here. (And no, I’m not following him yet, but who am I kidding? The seduction has already started anyway: He’s in my feed reader, so I may as well follow his tweets.) The other day he wrote an entry about Meetups:

I’ve gotten a bit tired of going to events populated by all the usual suspects. I am meeting lots of new people through this blog, tumblr, twitter, etc but I have not been able to say the same thing about the real world events I’ve been attending.

So I’ve decided to do something about that.

One of the things he did (and you’ll just have to click through to read about the other thing, because my blog entry is already too long) is to open a Twitter account for a place, which anyone can “follow” and to which anyone can tweet to say, “hey, I’m going there right now, meet up with me if you’re available.” The place in question is the Shake Shack, and it already has over 100 followers, all of whom will see updates to ShakeShack’s tweets in their Twitter accounts. So, if I were in NYC tomorrow, I could “follow” ShakeShack, send it an @ message that I’m going there for lunch, and then see if any of the other 100+ ShakeShack followers show up — maybe Fred Wilson himself would come!

Of course my question is, what could be the Shake Shack for Victoria? If we ever, ever see nice weather again, I suppose we could create a Twitter account for Red Fish Blue Fish? (Flash mob on the dock!)  Or Sticky Wicket? Or Cook Street Village? (One could easily detail in the @ message which of the 6 coffee shops you’re going to.)

In actual fact, it’s possible to create many places — not even necessarily attached to a specific venue. One could create a “Fort+Douglas” Twitter account, and then specify any favourite watering hole or coffee shop within a 2-3 block radius of that intersection. Or create “CookStreetVillage”; “Old Town”; “Harbour”; “VicWest” (that’d be a good one, with Abebooks and other tech-related companies clustering in the new developments there).

In other words, it’s quite easy to use “frivolous” platforms (which aren’t frivolous at all, really) to knit together actual places and actual people. For my money, that’s a fascinating and valuable thing.

On a related note, read The new oases; Nomadism changes buildings, cities and traffic, in the April 10, 2008 online edition of The Economist.

Information: the new “tea” (so many flavours!)

Mark Lise posted a pointer on his blog today, and then spun out some thoughts:

This morning I read a post from David Crow on “Community Platforms“. It got me thinking about our local community, that being Victoria and Vancouver. I have always been a supporter of community platforms and open source, but I’d like to see that go further into the real world.

Mark’s post prompted me to leave a comment, since I’ve been mulling something over along these lines for a while now. Click through to the entry to read — turns out this is also an interest of Boris Mann’s, and he’s going to be at DemoCampVictoria tomorrow evening. Sounds like there’s a conversation brewing!

Now I really feel compelled to write the blasted “concept overview” at last — although the elevator pitch still eludes me. I can see it, but describing it is a lot harder!

Mark’s World » Blog Archive » Community Platforms & Community Harmonization

It’s starting to get all buzzy: DemoCampVictoria coming up soon

I’ve let quite a few days go by without posting anything — let’s just say I got myself into a bit of mess around yet another local issue (memo to self: stop it with the letters to the editor!) and stuff demanded attention.

But I need to jump back into my blog today: I’m psyched that Better Web Posse blogged the upcoming April 3 DemoCampVictoria, from whence I followed several other links, including Tris Hussey’s post today, and also Aidan Henry’s post, Local Victoria Tech Scene Heating Up, from March 13. I’m really looking forward to this, and appreciate that Mark Lise and Brij Charan are pulling it together!

DemoCamp should be a lot of fun, and I’m thrilled that David Chard, the developer of several downtown Victoria condominium projects, was willing to help make it happen. He is providing the space at his 834 Johnson showroom and sales centre for the Juliet condominium currently under construction at the corner of Johnson and Blanshard. I think it’s a nice bit of synergy to see a developer of buildings hosting a group of developers of ideas. …Of course, there was that initial comical moment where we had to explain that the “demo” in DemoCamp refers to demonstration, and not to what might ominously spring to mind if you’re in the business of building things up, namely, demolition…

Last year, while the Gaining Ground summit was in session, David offered his showroom at 834 Johnson to host Vancouver-based urban planner, writer, and blogger Gordon Price, who gave a presentation on urban development. Gordon grew up in Victoria and provided a really thoughtful assessment of where we’ve been, with some sage advice on where we’re going.

In that same spirit of community participation, David has agreed to host Victoria’s first-ever DemoCamp. I hope it’s a trend in terms of participatory relations between all the local sectors that have an interest in seeing Victoria thrive as a vibrant, creative (artistic and technological/ entrepreneurial) city (and that’s a hint to others in downtown Victoria who might be able to offer space for subsequent DemoCamps!). It doesn’t matter if we’re developers, technologists, educators, artists in various fields, business people, or academics: we’re in this together (literally), on this little peninsula, which in turn is part of a larger regional network.

For more info, see the wiki page, DemoCampVictoria, and the Facebook page.

Daily Diigo Public Link 01/31/2008

Is the Tipping Point Toast? — Duncan Watts — Trendsetting Annotated

tags: business, duncan_watts, economic_anthropology, fast_company, influentials, malcolm_gladwell, network_theory, tipping_point, trendsetting

Article by FC’s Clive Thompson on the latest work by Duncan Watts, who argues against the idea the trends are created by “influentials” who bring matters to a tipping point.

Influentials On The Web Are People With The Power To Link - Publishing 2.0 Annotated

tags: blogs, influentials, links, publishing, scott_karp, web_2.0

Scott Karp’s article is a useful recap of what makes links so powerful, and why traditional media have to get over fears around losing what they think is an edge they have, namely being able to contain the user. And on making money, Karp writes: “Whenever I give talks to traditional publishers who have been afraid to link to other sites because it will “send people away” instead of keeping them trapped in the publisher’s own content, my now standard response is to say that there’s a site that does nothing but link to other sites — all it does is send people away. And yet remarkably, people keep coming back. So much so, that this strategy has translated into $10 billion+ in advertising revenue. (Yes, Google of course.)” …There you go.

Cool Hunting: Three New Stadiums Annotated

tags: architecture, reference, stadiums, starchitecture

Description/ links to 3 new stadiums, introduced thus: “In the era of starchitecture, few projects pose more of a challenge to renowned architects than the scale and complexity of a city’s crown jewel, the stadium.” The 3 projects are Camp Nou (Spain), Beijing National Stadium (China), and Wembley Stadium (UK). Camp Nou’s exterior in particular sounds fascinating — it could be a terrific public art work or an annoying visual nuisance, depending on articulation…

Hand-made links (for a change)

Why is it that some of the most salient material presents itself — and in the greatest quantities — when one already has a mountain of mental meal on one’s plate, with nary a cranial cranny remaining into which the new material may be stuffed?

I’m at the point where even bookmarking to Diigo isn’t good enough, because I can’t summon the energy to write a cogent annotation!

Therefore, in no particular order, some links of prime importance (in my world, anyway):
Regine at We Make Money Not Art posts two entries (Part I and Part II) on the DLD (Digital, Life, Design) conference held last month in Munich. Not only that, she includes specific references to other bloggers (Ulrike Reinhard, for example) who have posted more information (more than what’s already on DLD’s websites? Muss das sein?! …sigh…) and projects (like 192021) that I definitely need to follow up.

Part II includes way too much stuff for me to process right now — just this little picture/ diagram from one of the pages she references has me spinning:

Alert, alert: I’m thinking local local local, which starts to sound like “loco loco loco” after a while….

…Gawd, and don’t even get me started on Regine’s references to Patrick Schumacher (just a taste from WMMNA:

Patrik Schumacher mentioned that the challenge today for architects is to be able to comprehend and reflect in their work the increase in society complexity. Order and lack of complexity bring disorientation. A quick look at the way urban areas were built in the 50s brought us makes the case clearer.

“Order and lack of complexity bring disorientation.” Vraiment! It’s fatal to confuse order with “un-complex” organization. What our brains want is “ordered complexity” or “complex order,” which appeals to every person’s innate sense of pattern recognition (which, pace, is more than only “a subtopic of machine learning”).

…All this, and I haven’t even touched on several entries that rocked my world yesterday — outside.in’s announcement of a brilliant win-win deal with the Washington Post, or their VC’s most interesting blog post, Rethinking The Local Paper…

…All this, and this being the mere tip of the iceberg. Let’s not forget the links my husband sends — he tells me I have to watch Paulo Coelho (brilliant, from what I’ve heard, absolutely paradigm shifting) as well as Edward Tufte (ditto), and more… My inbox is overflowing…