My presentation at Applied Brilliance today was a quick version of my Innovation from Constraint talk, a talk that makes the argument that some of the best design ideas come from facing the constraints provided by material circumstance. Using a whole mess of examples stolen from Afrigadget, the talk argues that we hack technologies once they become familiar – from charcoal to bicycles to mobile phones. I ended with a couple of examples of innovative uses of social network technology, making the case that people were often using web2.0 tools for activism because the tools were what they had access to in closed, repressive societies, not because the tools were somehow shinier than traditional media tools.

After all four morning speakers presented, the session moderator presented the four of us, and the room, with an interesting dillema. He asked us to imagine that we were architects and that our firm had been hired by a developer to build a super-luxury seven star hotel in Senegal. We each offered our hopes for a hotel that was environmentally responsible and culturally sensitive, at least, within the constraints of our own worldviews. While I wanted to ensure that the public spaces of the exclusive hotel were open to the general public, incorporating Dakar’s remarkable musical culture, Tom Shannon wanted to bury the hotel deep underground and fill it with ice rinks and other cold-based features, powered by thermal exchange towers spanning the deep ocean and the hot, humid sky…

So our moderator changed the question – assume the developer rejected all your interesting, environmental culturally appropriate ideas and insisted on Dubai meets Disney in Dakar. Would you take the job, or would you turn it down, forcing you to fire most of the staff of your firm? Our panel split pretty evenly between those who felt that one had to defend artistic and cultural vision versus those who felt that even an ugly, evil hotel could have benefits to local workers and craftsmen if executed wisely. (Guess which camp I was in.)

What was exciting was turning this second question over to the architects and designers in the audience and getting their feedback after a short deliberative session. Many of the teams fought the question, arguing that the goal was to persuade the developer that the only way to compete in a global market was combining luxury with responsibility. But my favorite response came from an architect who referenced the ideas of creative reuse in my talk and said, “Build the hotel. Assume it’s going to fail and be left to fall apart. How do you build a building so that it can be hacked after the fact?”

Amazing idea. Not unlike Stewart Brand’s critical observation in How Buildings Learn that we need buildings that can be shaped to our needs, evolving over time. But it’s a very different design challenge to build something designed with the idea that it might be impermanent, and might be more useful in its component parts than as a coherent whole – it’s a way of thinking that I suspect must be disconcerting to a lot of architects. Discussing the idea afterwards, another architect mentioned that environmentally conscious architects are working hard to design and execute buildings that have almost no construction waste – this is probably a very different strategy than one you might take where your agenda as an architect is to provide local craftsmen with new skills and materials that aren’t available locally… like the difference between designing software when you’re trying to minimize expensive human labor and when you’re trying to take advantage of hundreds of thousands of distributed minds.

The downside of giving a lot of talks is that you don’t get enough downtime to develop your own ideas. The upside – you get lots of amazing ideas from people riffing off the ideas you’ve shared. A balancing act…

I’m at the Applied Brilliance conference this morning, a gathering of architects and designers in Bolton Landing, NY, a gorgeous corner of Adirondack State Park. I wasn’t actually scheduled to speak here – my friend Omar Wasow had to pull out of the event so he could be on Oprah’s show today. Since I’m just down the road, I’m pinch hitting. (I guess that the fact that Omar’s known for his work on social networking in the African American community and since I study social networking in Africa, I can talk in his stead…)

Robert Gaskell of the Planetary Science Institute describes himself as a “maverick mapmaker of the solar system.” His specialty is interpreting what spacecraft see and turning it into maps of the solar system. He explains that, like a farmer’s son who learns to drive the tractor by riding alongside his father, he learned his craft by being raised by mathematicians, who started his education with “the topology of folding diapers.”

The math Gaskell is now interested in involves modeling asteroids, planetoids and other space features so we can figure out how to navigate around them… and he explains that his knowledge of the field is like that of the son on the tractor. He’s worked on a wide range of outer space projects and learned in the process about modeling the destinations of spacecraft.

He shows us the launch of the Dawn space craft, which is headed towards the asteroid Vespa. It’s making a two year journey powered by ion propulsion, an engine that spews out electrified xenon gas. Dawn will orbit Vespa and dwarf planet Ceres – to navigate, the engineers need accurate models of the asteroids. It’s possible to detect the position of the spacecraft using a huge radio telescope, tracking the craft’s small signal. And you can track craft speed by examining the doppler shift of the signal. But to navigate, you need to be able to see features on these celestial bodies and manuver in response.

Gaskell’s innovation was to realize that the way we generally build these maps was overly difficult and clumsy. Traditionally, we look for images taken in fly-bys that are from the same position, with the same lighting and at a high level of cleanliness and clarity. But Gaskell remembered making a charcoal sketch of a still-life as an eight grader and realized that the techniques of shading he’d learned those years ago could be applied to modeling other worlds. Specifically, he focused on ways to construct “limbs” – the demarcation between a lit portion of an object and space – and “terminators” – demarcation between a shadowed portion and space – which jointly allowed him to build 3d computer models from hybrid images. The inputs included a wide set of images captured in fly-bys, not just the perfect images.

The technique has been used to model several celestial bodies that NASA and other space agencies have wanted to orbit or land craft on. By creating highly accurate models, the spacecraft can find visible features on the asteroid’s surface and pinpoint their location. Gaskell is now modeling Mercury and a few of the satellites of Saturn, finding locations where probes could safely land.

He ends by showing us a 3D movie of the asteroid Itokawa, the destination of Japanese space probe Hayabusa. The asteroid rotates solemly in virtual space as Gaskell points out the “pencil-shaped boulder” that served as lodestar for navigators guiding the probe. As we don red and blue 3D glasses, the film soundtrack swells. It’s “The Rainbow Connection”, and we sit silently in a hotel ballroom, watching a movie of a place none of us will ever see while a stuffed green frog sings. It’s a special moment.

I’m at the Applied Brilliance conference this morning, a gathering of architects and designers in Bolton Landing, NY, a gorgeous corner of Adirondack State Park. I wasn’t actually scheduled to speak here – my friend Omar Wasow had to pull out of the event so he could be on Oprah’s show today. Since I’m just down the road, I’m pinch hitting. (I guess that the fact that Omar’s known for his work on social networking in the African American community and since I study social networking in Africa, I can talk in his stead…)

Artist, scultpor and inventor Tom Shannon starts his talk with cartoons, designed by his alter-ego, Teapot. They include the Nice Ass pavillion (a pair of shapely mounds), the Tuning Fork Factory (predictably shaped) and the High Rise Camping Tent (“All the inconvenience of camping in one convenient midtown location.”)

As absurd as these ideas are, they’re not far from the absurdities that Shannon has actually designed. He shows us the original design for the Empire State Building, a 86-story structure with a flat top. The iconic pointed shape is the result of an interest in dirigibles – the pointed top was designed to be a landing and mooring platform. In the 1950s, the tower gained a TV tower. In the 1980s, Shannon proposed adding a optically perfect, polished sphere. It would reflect the environment out to the ocean horizon, showing the traffic as well as the celestial sphere as a vision hovering about New York City.

He didn’t get to build the sphere, but he’s now working on a project called Air Genie, which – oddly enough – may accomplish the same thing. Air Genie is a giant circle filled with helium. It’s 110 feet in diameter, the minimum size needed to support the 60 million LEDs that cover its surface (weighing 20 tons). This allows the sphere to have the resolution of a laptop computer at 50 meters. He shows us an image of New York photographed by an on-board camera and “reflected” on the sphere’s surface.

Air Genie could land on a college campus and teach us about geography and plate tectonics, he speculates. We could float spheres above two cities and allow teleconferencing on a city to city basis. Because the sphere can see behind itself, it can become somewhat invisible by displaying the background behind. And – and critically, I suspect – it would be a great light show at a huge dance party.

Shannon would like to float larger objects in the air. This means moving beyond helium, which is effective, but very expensive. He shows us a highly speculative project, a set of translucent islands that hover above the ocean. They need to be island-sized, he tells us, because they’ll float on vacuum. “Perhaps they’ll be built by nanotech, made out of clear diamond”, and will allow landmasses and water to float above water. He tells us that the vision is slightly closer to reality with the advent of graphene, a carbon honeycomb a single atom thick which could contain helium or other atoms permanently.

He’s obsessed with platonic solids and the characteristics of them, he tells us. This fascination has manifested in a series of pieces that involve spheres, hovering in air in free space. The spheres are powerful magnets, that hold themselves in tension and opposition. Showing us an installation at the Tokyo Broadcasting Headquarters, he explains that these installations are affected by the earth’s magnetic field, which is connected to the earth and sun’s magnetic fields – it’s literally and visibly connected to the universe.

A series of sculptures explore “heavy weightlessness”. He shows us a polished stainless steel surface, apparently hovering in thin air. It’s balanced on a very small point, so while it weighs a couple tons, air currents will move it. The newest sculpture in this series is premiering at an art installation in Aix en Provence, where it lives in a beautiful meadow, designed to both capture and evoke morning dew.

I’m at the Applied Brilliance conference this morning, a gathering of architects and designers in Bolton Landing, NY, a gorgeous corner of Adirondack State Park. I wasn’t actually scheduled to speak here – my friend Omar Wasow had to pull out of the event so he could be on Oprah’s show today. Since I’m just down the road, I’m pinch hitting. (I guess that the fact that Omar’s known for his work on social networking in the African American community and since I study social networking in Africa, I can talk in his stead…)

William Uricchio of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department leads off a morning session on “invention” with a discussion about participatory culture. He notes that there’s a separation between the US and Europe on these topics. Americans tend to be more optimistic about technologies like Wikipedia, while Europeans are more skeptical. He notes that there’s also a generational fault line between people who think that these technologies are benevolent versus those who think they’re dangerous.

Uricchio shows a picture of the earth seen from the moon. He notes that this image shows us the pinnacle of a certain scientific regime that made the photo possible via space travel. He suggests that the image shows us object/subject relationships, three point perspective and other aspects that are part of modern culture. He invokes Heidegger, suggesting that the idea of a world concieved as a picture would have been inconcievable in the Middle Ages. The ability to grasp, pin down and picture reality is characteristic of modernity.

His talk starts with a section titled “Modernity and the algorismic vision” – algorism is a word we don’t see much these days. It’s a real word – it’s a way of doing arithmetic by following simple rules – but while it dominated discourse from the 1500s through the 1900s, the word “algorithm” – more complex procedures or processes. Algorism was the underpinning of the three point perspective – you could reproduce reality with a high degree of accuracy by following simple rules. “Follow the rules and you can’t go wrong.”

We’re now living in a different age, an era of participatory culture. Participation is an old phenomenon, something that’s been around forever. But it was overwritten by the culture industries at the start of the 20th century. We’re moving away from this commercial, centralized production of culture, being shaped in part by technologies like fiber, capable of delivering information at 32 terabits per second, which would allow us to transmit the Library of Congress in a few seconds. This raises questions of whether we become a culture of storage, or of circulation.

Uricchio quickly namechecks some participatory phenomena:
- the creation of thousands of applications for the iPhone
- SETI@Home, an application of grid computing
- open source and commons production that makes Wikipedia possible
- crowdsourcing, which he characterizes as “group production privatized, for profit” through systems like Threadless.

Common to these all is the notion of the algorithm. He shows us Photosynth, the remarkable application that’s capable of creating rich 3D spaces from photos found on the web. Rather than building a space by building a model, the model emerges from the production of thousands of amateur photographers. “From Descartes to the moon shot, it’s been about specifying who’s the subject and who’s the object.” But that’s extremely unclear in the age of Photosynth. Who’s the agent making the picture? Whose perspective are we seeing? In a participatory age, we’re moving from an I to we. Our experience is experiential, not just spatial, and we need to reconsider how we look and see.