About control
"This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are." - Plato
We are used to be controlled. The artificial environment was/is always a result of an intentional act. There is always something behind it: money or ideology (to gain more money).
All “public spaces” even the concept itself was created as a reaction on certain facts and social changes.
Housing policy is a direct reflection of political/economical tendencies (American suburbia or Soviet modernism).
In a shopping mall we are fully controlled: cameras, face recognition, control gates, security, card chips.
Nowadays there is another layer of control - “Data is the new oil”. Digital natives feel comfortable with it. It is a perfect instrument of control for corporations and government. But we all agree to it just by having Google or Facebook account. It is not bad or good - it is natural. The question is what does this new level of control (=profit; digital economy) means to a design environment, to a city, to a designer and the users?
It is not only about physical transformations. A city as one big shopping mall equipped with all possible tracking systems - is not future, it is the reality. Which could actually serve people and an environment for good (with a certain “bad” backside as always). If a city is a service why should not the principles of a shopping mall design be transported to urban environment to make it successful? For example, organizations like Habidatum or Spin Unit (I worked with the last one) are using data from Instagram and Facebook, etc to analyze the usage of public space in details (gender, day of time, what do people do, what do they like etc), anthropologists with designers are analyzing this data and transform it into design appropriate to the exact place. It is in a way mental map/psychomap transformed directly into the design. Anyway, however I use this information as a designer, I will follow somebody's interests even while trying to avoid this. "Rebellions" are the parts of the systems, but for sure they could help to make changes in the systems.
Maybe design as a platform is a solution?
I think it can be dangerous for designers to over analyse data trends in this way. By dangerous, I mean a dangerous waist of time. Perhaps this is too harsh..but as we have discussed in class, there is only so mush we can do as designers to promote uses for space. 'Public space' in particular. So I do not mean to say that these projects are useless, because they certainly are not. I think they are quite comprehensive in their research for programming toward the modern generation.
ReplyDeleteI just think that it narrows your findings to a certain percentage to users. I mean I use pubic space all of the time but don' post about it. Does that make my opinion less valuable?
You are right. That is why in the analysis these companies and designers are using not only big data as a source but lots of other ways to make pre-design research. There are professionals to know how to do that correctly and take into account not some limited group of people.
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