New Use of Cellular Networks
The Necessity of Recognizing the Nuances of Privacy

According to media researcher Martijn de Waal, it is time to rethink our ideas of privacy. The growing use of cellular networks is generating data that plays an important role in civil society projects. To be able to continue using such data in a meaningful and fair way, people must become aware of the fact that privacy is not only a question of either private or public, but includes many gradations in between.

During the Notte Bianca 2007 (an event in Rome comparable with the Museum Night in the Netherlands), researchers from MIT’s SENSEable City Lab set up at different urban locations a number of big screens upon which they projected dynamic maps of the city. Light blue spots indicated large numbers of people, thus enabling visitors to the event to immediately see which museum was crowded and plan their route accordingly. Making the task even easier, yellow stripes representing Rome’s municipal buses could be followed live on the same map. This project – ‘WikiCity Rome’ – sounds like a nice gimmick. The researchers gained access to the location data of mobile phone users through a telecom company. The anonymized coordinates of individual phones were combined to compile an algorithm of a – handsomely designed – real-time map of nighttime Rome.1

But ‘WikiCity Rome’ was more than just a gimmick. The project made use of an important shift in the functionality of the mobile phone (or ‘cellphone’, as it is called in parts of the English-speaking world). It is no longer simply a means of communication. Increasingly, the mobile phone is also being used as a sensor that gathers information about us and our surroundings.2 Location coordinates, images and sounds can be recorded and shared with friends, colleagues, social institutes or even with others who are unknown to us. This new use of mobile phones can have great social consequences, but it also raises questions about privacy. Who has access to all of this data we are gathering? To whom does this information actually belong? To us? The telephone company? Or should it – in anonymous form of course – be considered common property? Ought the government be allowed to monitor our movements in times of emergency? And if so, precisely what constitutes an emergency?

For the American civil rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), these developments are sufficient reason to introduce a new category of privacy: ‘locational privacy’. Will we still be able to move through a city in the near future without the places we go to being systematically recorded in all sorts of databases?3 The new developments are so far-reaching that we must ask ourselves whether our traditional idea of privacy is still tenable. The discussion is no longer only about the right to be able to act anonymously in our private lives without the government or our employers looking over our shoulders. In many instances, people will actually want to voluntarily make information about their private lives public. For the fact of the matter is that this can also have certain advantages, both for individuals and for society as a whole. But precisely what are the conditions under which this occurs? What possibilities does technology offer for sharing or protecting information? In this essay, I would first like to give a number of examples of how the use of the mobile phone as a sensor encroaches upon our lives in today’s society. Then I will go into the consequences of this for the debate on privacy and technology.

Scientific Research: A New Form of Demography?

Researchers in various disciplines are extremely enthusiastic about the mobile phone as a means of collecting data. Finally, they sigh, we can chart the behaviour of an entire population in real time instead of taking a few random samples afterwards. ‘Reality Mining’ is the name of the new discipline in which different streams of data are combined to get a handle on complex social processes. Social scientists often speak in slightly euphoric terms about these new possibilities. For instance, take Alex Pentland of the MIT Medialab: ‘By using data from mobile phones . . . we can create a “god’s eye” view of how the people in organizations interact, and even “see” the rhythms of interaction for everyone in a city.’4 This new method of measuring not only gives better insight into social processes, claims Pentland, it also has greater predictive value. Traditional demography, he states, is a bad predictor of behaviour. How old someone is, where they live and even their income is interesting information, but says little about how that person will behave in the future. Only when you can actually analyse their behaviour, can you – within certain margins – start predicting. Says Pentland: ‘The fact that mobile phones have GPS means that we can leap beyond demographics directly to measuring behaviour. Where do people eat? Work? Hang out? How does word of mouth spread? Analysis of travel patterns using mobile phone GPS data, for instance, allows discovery of the independent subgroups within a city.’5

At present, the mobile phone is already being used in this manner for health care research. In Kenya, for example, mobile phone data is being used to localize breeding grounds of infection for malaria. Other scientists have developed algorithms with which – again through data generated by mobile phone use – behavioural patterns that indicate the outbreak of a cholera epidemic can be identified. In the Dominican Republic, research into the spread of HIV is being conducted in a similar fashion.6

Urban planners are also enthusiastic about this new way of collecting information. The British ‘Cityware’ project tracked visitors to inner cities with the help of the Bluetooth technology on their phones.7 Here too, expectations are often high. Anthony Townsend, for instance, a researcher specialized in technology, sees the rise of networked sensors as a development comparable to the rise of aerial photography. For urban planners, that was a revolutionary media technology: for the first time, they could see the city from above, as a whole. And if aerial photography reveals the city’s skeleton, we now have a view of its nervous system. For the first time in history, people often optimistically say, we can observe all sorts of social interactions in the city in real time.

A little perspective is not out of place here, however. Although these methods of gathering data certainly can lead to new insights, the debate still does not address the question of exactly what kind of knowledge they actually produce. Data is not the same as knowledge, and so far the nature of the data is primarily quantitative. Researchers now know how many people are at certain places at certain times, where they have come from and where they are going. But more qualitative aspects – why do people move as they do, and what is their experience of that? – still remain out of the picture as a rule.

Citizen Science

In the above instances, scientists work from the top down in collecting great amounts of data in order to analyse social processes. But the mobile phone can also be used to collect data from the bottom up, at the initiative of users themselves. ‘Biketastic’, a project aimed at bicyclists in the notoriously car-oriented city of Los Angeles that has been set up by the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, is one such example. This research centre from the University of California Los Angeles has developed a mobile phone app that bicyclists can use to collect data on their trips through the city and share it with one another. The app measures the location, distance and speed of the bicycle route, but also its comfort. The microphone measures the noise of the other traffic, while the accelerometer indicates whether the cyclist can smoothly cruise along or has to keep stopping and starting. The geographical data can later be linked with external databases: How much air pollution is there throughout the route? And what about traffic safety? By combining the data from different cyclists with external databases, after a while you also get a bicycle map of Los Angeles with which you can plan the most pleasant, safest, cleanest or fastest route.8

This is similar to a number of ‘Citizen Science’ projects, in which citizens use the mobile phone’s sensor capacity in order to work together for a specific purpose. Eric Paulos conducted research on campaigns in which neighbourhood residents charted the quality of the air with the help of mobile sensors. Such campaigns had many positive effects. The participants gained an increased awareness of the problem of air quality and their involvement in local politics improved.9 But there are also negative aspects: Just how trustworthy is the data that is collected? Can the results be influenced, for example by holding a sensor next to a car muffler?10

Personalized Locational Services

Finally, the use of the mobile phone as a sensor can also have advantages for individual users. The mobile phone makes it possible to register information about your life automatically. Services like Google Latitude or Bliin plot your movements through the city on a map. You yourself are always at the centre, surrounded by those of your friends who have the service turned on and voluntarily share their data with you. Other services, like Yelp in the USA, also centre the map on the user’s position and then place balloon markers for the nearest pizzeria, optician, cash dispenser, taxi or other search command. Companies like Sensenetworks can also make analyses of your spatial behaviour and use that to recommend all sorts of services to you.

Christophe Aguiton, Dominique Cardon and Zbigniew Smoreda – researchers at Orange Labs, the R&D department of France Telecom – call this phenomenon ‘Living Maps’. A map is no longer a static representation of a geographical reality but a dynamic reflection of social activities. In the long run, the advent of such maps can lead to a cultural shift. Right now, our social lives still largely consist of making appointments that we write down in our agendas. But after a while, a ‘map of opportunities’ might very well seem like a much more attractive idea. If you momentarily have nothing to do, simply take a look at your personalized map. Who is in the immediate vicinity right now to meet up with? What is there to do at a reasonable distance from where I am?11

Critics point out that this can have huge consequences for life in the city. Does it still leave any room for chance encounters with the unknown? Will we become ‘people without characteristic traits’ who slavishly follow the recommendations of our ‘clever’ systems? These are relevant and meaningful discussions, which I do not wish to go into further right now. In the second part of this essay, I prefer to examine the notion of privacy that is at stake with these new technologies.12

Who Is the Owner?

How does the advent of the mobile phone as a sensor relate to our thinking about privacy? In academic circles, a cautious consensus is becoming apparent: users should be the owners of their own data. No matter how you generate data – for example, through the sensors in your mobile phone – you must be able to access that data, wipe it out yourself, keep it saved securely, and decide what is going to happen with it. Only in very exceptional circumstances should the government be able to have access to such databases.13 A view like this could very well lead to new forms of inequality. Personal particulars are very attractive data for commercial parties, and some critics suspect that the selling of your personal data will be made attractive. People who don’t want to share their personal details with commercial parties will, for example, have to pay more for a mobile phone subscription.14

Precisely what does ‘data ownership’ mean for the analysis of information on an aggregated scale? Are researchers only allowed to collect data if phone users give them permission to do so? And is that permission also necessary if the data is only used for mapping group behaviour? After all, in such cases the individual information is swallowed up in the group profile and a link with individual behaviour can no longer be made. But then, who is allowed to collect this sort of information, and under what conditions? Should telephone companies collaborate on this, for example?

Erin Keneally and Kimberly Claffy – researchers at UC San Diego – argue in favour of regulation that takes into account the positive aspects of sharing data. At present, the rules are not always so clear about what is allowed and what is not. As a result, many parties react defensively to requests for sharing data. They prefer not to take risks, seeing as the debate on privacy escalates quickly. The idea of privacy as the absolute right to protection of personal particulars soon loses out to the possible social benefits of sharing data – such as in the above-mentioned instances in the area of health care, for example. Keneally and Claffy call upon researchers and the telecom industry to develop a new protocol that makes the sharing of data possible and at the same time limits the risks of improper use of sensitive information.

Nathan Eagle compares ‘reality mining’ with large-scale medical research projects. There too, extremely sensitive personal information is stored in databases, which is why there are strict rules for their use: only professionals have access to the information and they must sign in when they want to use the databases. Eagle therefore proposes that such protocols also be quickly set up for the use of sensor data from mobile phones.

Organizations like the Dutch ‘Bits of Freedom’ are concerned about these new developments. Information that is stored anonymously, warns this organization, does not always remain that way. ‘Better technologies are always being developed to strip anonymous data of their anonymity. What might not be a “personal detail” now can soon turn into one.’15 Researchers Aguiton, Cardon and Smoreda concur. More than once in the past, new technologies have made it possible to trace anonymous data to specific users.16

The EFF therefore proposes using cryptography to design systems such that sensor information can be used without having to store it. Technologically, this is a rather roundabout way, although possible: ‘But we need to ensure that systems aren’t being built right at the zero-privacy, everything-is-recorded end of that spectrum, simply because that’s the path of easiest implementation.’17

The Desire to Share Data

The EFF’s idea of using strong cryptography can protect personal sensor data. That might come in handy with a system like pay-as-you-drive, for example. But there are also situations in which users do want to share their data, albeit not necessarily always or with everyone.

In daily life, privacy is a complex and above all dynamic negotiation between various parties, argue researchers Paul Dourish and Leysia Palen. In social situations, what plays a role is not so much the fear of the state’s misusing information but is much more likely to be ordinary worries. People do not want to be embarrassed. They want to assert their authority or voice in a certain area. And they like to have control over their own lives. Because of this, we make different demands of privacy at different moments.

In social situations it is often more important to make yourself known than to protect your privacy. If you want to capitalize on your authority in a certain area, you have to be able to show the corresponding badges. With the help of all sorts of signs – varying from word choice to greeting rituals – we send out signals through which others can deduce our social status or background. Sometimes we want to give our opinion, or we benefit from letting others know who we are. Just how much we wish to reveal depends upon what estimate we make of a situation. Who exactly is the audience? What do we expect, hope or fear in regard to the situation? Privacy, in other words, is a question of ‘identity management’, in which we show or conceal different aspects of ourselves to different audiences in different situations.

Palen and Dourish’s most important point is that the use of the mobile phone as a sensor, combined with the storage of information in databases, changes the parameters of this privacy negotiation. The situations in which we find ourselves are originally spatial and temporal. They are physically limited, for instance by the four walls of a room, and have a certain duration. Both factors play an important role in the estimates we make. We can see who is present and who is not – and therefore who could call us to account for an eventual faux pas.

When we use automatic sensors to register our behaviour in all sorts of situations and share it with others – for instance through social networks – the nature of the situation changes. Suddenly, space, time and audience are no longer limited, and instead the registration of the situation can also be called up at other times and places. But can another audience actually interpret the original context of the situation properly? And maybe you would have acted very differently if you knew that the audience was going to be wider.

Researcher Danah Boyd has written about how this development can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings. As an expert on social networking, Boyd was approached by the admissions committee of a leading university. They had received an application from a student from South Central LA. In a letter describing his motivation, he wrote that he wanted to break away from the gang life there. But when the committee looked at his page on a social network, Myspace, they saw all sorts of symbols glorifying gang life. Was he making a fool of them? Boyd pointed out to the committee that there was also another possibility. The applicant’s Myspace page was intended for his classmates and neighbours, not the admissions committee. And in his neighbourhood the social pressure to be part of something is so high that the young man probably could do nothing else but post the gang’s insignia on his Myspace page.18

Similarly, a commotion arose over the Facebook website. There too, users can voluntarily keep a log of their activities, hobbies and other titbits of information. At first this was only possible on the person’s own page. But one day Facebook changed the setup of its site. All of the messages that users placed on their own page were now automatically published on the pages of all their ‘friends’. Facebook’s reasoning was that this way, friends would be better able to keep abreast of each other’s activities. Besides, hadn’t the information already been made public by users on their own page?

Facebook didn’t do much more than publishing what was already public. But many Facebook users thought otherwise. They saw a subtle difference between making something public on one’s own page, which others must make an effort to access, and automatically distributing that data.19 Once again, this was about the assessment that users make of their audience in determining what information they do or do not wish to make public. To be sure, the information was now being distributed among friends, but there were also subtle differences within that. Some friends might very well be difficult co-workers that a person would not want to offend by rejecting their ‘friendship request’. And people show different things to members of their family than they do to old school friends. Facebook does not make it possible to make that distinction.

Privacy as Design Criterion

At the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS, the research lab behind the earlier-mentioned bicycle project in LA) they therefore believe that privacy is an important responsibility for designers. There should be a system that gives users the possibility to decide for themselves what information they want to share with whom, under what conditions, and for what length of time.20 This is why it is important that designers develop systems that visualize information in an understandable way and that immediately make it clear
what sort of consequences certain settings can have.

CENS itself uses such an application in its Personal Environmental Impact Report (PEIR) project, in which data is again collected with the help of mobile phones. This information is then converted into a carbon footprint and simultaneously combined with databases on local air pollution. In this way, users not only learn how much they themselves contribute to air pollution but also how much pollution they are being exposed to. In a log file, users can see precisely how the system uses their data: what information is registered when, and uploaded and shared with whom. Eric Paulos argues that interfaces like this should also make clear how reliable such (collectively gathered) data are. It is important that users do not trust all flows of data blindly, but that they always remain aware that data can be manipulated, or even simply not collected accurately.21

Aguiton et al go one step further. Not only should users be able to have insight into the manner in which information about them is collected, they should also be able to manipulate that information. Users have the right to lie to the system about their actual whereabouts in order to protect their privacy, they claim.22

The above-mentioned examples show that our thinking about privacy has to be reconsidered. The sensor data collected by mobile phones can play an important social role, for example in the area of public health. Such data can – as in the ‘citizen science’ instances – play a role in civil society projects. And some people will experience sharing data with others as an enrichment of their lives.

Involved parties point out that many of the present regulations are inadequate. On the one hand, the positive aspects of sharing data anonymously should be given more attention. At the same time, the awareness must also grow that privacy is not a binary affair in which something is either completely public or completely private. Between the two extremes lie many gradations that by no means are always taken into consideration in the design of new technologies. And providers of location services and social networks, for example, should also be stimulated to give the many nuances of privacy in everyday life a place in their services.

1. See senseable.mit.edu/wikicity/rome/ for a summary of the project and, for an extensive analysis of the project, Francesco Calabrese, Kristian Kloeckl and Carlo Ratti, ‘WikiCity: Real-Time Location-Sensitive Tools for the City’, in: Marcus Foth (ed.), Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City (London/Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, 2009).

2. For example, see Eric Paulos, who maintains that there is an ‘important new shift in mobile phone usage – from communication tool to “networked mobile personal measurement instrument”’. Eric Paulos, ‘Designing for Doubt: Citizen Science and the Challenge of Change’, lecture for the conference ‘Engaging Data’, Cambridge, MA: SENSEable City Lab, 2009.
senseable.mit.edu/engagingdata/program.html

3. www.eff.org/wp/locational-privacy.

4. web.media.mit.edu/~sandy/.

5. Alex Pentland, ‘Reality Mining of Mobile Communications’, The Global Information Technology Report 2008-2009. World Economic Forum, 2009.

6. See Nathan Eagle, ‘Engineering a Common Good: Fair Use of Aggregated, Anonymized Behavioral Data’, lecture for the conference ‘Engaging Data’, Cambridge, MA: SENSEable City Lab, 2009.

7. www.cityware.org.uk.

8. See research.cens.ucla.edu and biketastic.com/.

9. Paulos, ‘Designing for Doubt’, op. cit. (note 2). Also see Jason Corburn, Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

10. Paulos, ‘Designing for Doubt’, op. cit. (note 2).

11. Christophe Aguiton, Dominique Cardon and Zbigniew Smoreda, ‘Living Maps: New Data, New Uses, New Problems’, lecture for the conference ‘Engaging Data’, Cambridge, MA: SENSEable City Lab, 2009. Also see recent lectures by Antoine Picon and Nanna Verhoeff, in which they respectively describe how digital maps can be understood as ‘media events’ or ‘performance of space’ instead of only a ‘systematic geographic representation’. www.themobilecity.nl/2008/01/22/mediacity-conference-weimar-the-design-of-urban-situations/ and networkcultures.org/wpmu/urbanscreens/2009/12/05/nanna-verhoeff-mobile-digital-cartography-from-representation-to-performance-of-space/.

12. See, among others, Marc Shepard and Adam Greenfield, Urban Computing and Its Discontents (New York: The Architectural League of New York, 2007); Jerome E. Dobson and Peter Fischer, ‘Geoslavery’, in: IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, Spring 2003.

13. Pentland, op. cit. (note 4).

14. Eagle, ‘Engineering a Common Good’, op. cit. (note 5).

15. www.bof.nl/2009/12/18/hoe-anoniem-zijn-anonieme-gegevens-eigenlijk/.

16. Aguiton et al, ‘Living Maps’, op. cit. (note 11).

17. www.eff.org/wp/locational-privacy.

18. Danah Boyd, ‘Do you See What I See? Visibility of Practices through Social Media’, LeWeb, Paris, 2009.

19. Danah Boyd, ‘Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence’, in: Convergence, vol.14 (2008) no. 1, 13-20.

20. Katie Shilton, ‘Four Billion Little Brothers? Privacy, Mobile Phones, and Ubiquitous Data Collection’, in: Queue, vol. 7 (2009) no. 7.

21. Paulos, ‘Designing for Doubt’, op. cit. (note 2).

22. Aguiton et al, ‘Living Maps’, op. cit. (note 11).

—
Open #19 Privacy, the main theme of Open #19, is a right that protects one’s private life, a right that is not only established by law but also has political and social significance. It can be experienced and observed differently by individuals and groups, depending upon their position in society and the desires and interests involved.
In this issue, the concept of privacy is examined and reconsidered from legal, sociological, media-theoretical and activist perspectives. The focus is not so much on deploring the loss of privacy but on taking the present situation of ‘post-privacy’ for what it is and trying to gain insight into what is on the horizon in terms of new subjectivities and power constructions.

This issue of OPEN will be launched during he opening weekend of the Berlin Biennial on Saturday June 12th. Philosopher and theorist Gerald Raunig will give his lecture ‘Beyond Privacy: Desiring DIVIDUALITY’, followed by an informal reception in the charming Villa Elisabeth.

What, where and when

On August 16-17 2010 The Mobile City and Virtueel Platform organized ‘Designing the Hybrid City’. This event explored the role of digital technologies in urban design. It took place in the Dutch Culture Centre in Shanghai.

Our event was part of a cluster of events called Adaptation: Designing the Future City that took place August 14-17 in the context of the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai.

Main theme: how do digital technologies alter urban culture and change urban design?

Mobile and wireless technologies increasingly shape our urban environment and turn our cities into ‘hybrid cities’. What does this mean for urban design? How should we deal with this emerging relation between digital technologies and the city? Which approaches have already proven successful? Which experiments have the most promise? What can different disciplines involved in urban technology and interface design learn from each other? And how is the process of urban design itself changing?

We investigated 6 different themes:

• Designing the Hybrid City
• Everyday life in the Hybrid City
• Engaging Hybrid Citizens
• Identity and self-expression in the Hybrid City
• Working in the Hybrid City
• Art in the Hybrid City

See MainTheme for information about the program. See Program Overview for more details about the 6 themes.

I am one of the organizers of the Mediafonds@Sandberg Masterclass that couples new media designers with traditional media directors to experiment with innovative ways of storytelling. For the 2010 edition we are focussing on ‘Datavisualization’, and Database Culture in a more general way and what this might mean for the documentary format. The Program consists of a Conference open to the general public and a Masterclass for invited participants.

Follow The Money
The database as a narrative form

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, our lives play out in a succession of databases and spreadsheets. Not only do we spend all day rummaging through countless data streams like Google and Facebook; everything we do leaves traces behind in other databases, through public transport chip cards, supermarket club cards and electronic medical files. The influence of databases, Excel sheets and algorithms has never been as clearly visible as it became during the credit crisis. The crisis cast a cold light on the fact that the global financial system had been built on the basis of mathematical models that attempted to quantify human behaviour. Blinded by the beauty of impressive mathematical systems, people thought they could precisely understand the risks of investments. Meanwhile it has become clear how risky it is to be dependent on these.

The media world, too, is paying more attention to the ever-increasing data streams. Data visualisation – a genre within visual culture that depicts data streams in provocative, poetic or insightful ways – has been booming, thanks to the growing availability of large amounts of data and the desire to grasp ever more complex realities by visual means. But is it always a good idea to assign such an important role to numerical information? How can we best interpret various data in relation to the values we consider important? And which new forms of storytelling does data visualisation have to offer us? Will the data film be the new documentary form?

The Mediafonds@Sandberg conference will consider the possibilities and consequences of these developments for media producers.

Goal of the workshop: to share with CI students and staff knowledge and visions on developments in New Media and Journalism.

The workshop will address three important themes.
• Distribution and context of journalistic ‘content’ in the digital world /Journalism in a new media ‘ecology’
• Audience: Rethinking the relation between journalists and their audiences
• Form: New media and new journalistic formats

The workshops focused on conceptual issues. It is the goal to inspire students with many examples and international best practices on new media journalism and to provoke them into a new way of thinking about their profession, its role in society and their relation to the audience.

How can architects relate to digital media?

The Mobile City keynote at the ‘Day of the Young Architect’: outcomes and further thoughts

written by Michiel de Lange & Martijn de Waal

Introducing the main questions

What do developments in digital media have to do with architecture? And how should architects and urbanists relate to developments in new media? The Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) and Royal Institute of Dutch Architects (BNA) invited The Mobile City to address that question for the yearly ‘Day of the Young Architect’, on November 7th 2009 in the NAi in Rotterdam. This day was themed ‘the virtual’, and was organized as part of the overarching ‘connectivity’ cluster during the 4th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR).

We gladly accepted this challenge, since this very issue was one of the main reasons we founded The Mobile City two years ago. After all, as the boundaries between physical and digital spaces blur, this should have profound consequences not only for new media developers but also for those professionals who traditionally deal with physical spaces. We surely did not expect this to be already obvious for most architects. But the fact that only half of the audience raised their hands when asked by moderator JaapJan Berg whether architects should deal with digital media in their profession showed there is still some way to go.

This report contains the main argument of our talk. But it also presents some additional reflections, and is an attempt to take our argument further than we did at the NAi/BNA day. We address the following questions: what position can architects, planners and urbanists take in their design profession vis-a-vis new media? Why should they bother with new media in the first place? What are the challenges they face? And what are future directions and chances for these professions?

In answering these questions, we make a strong plea for an attitude of ‘critical engagement’. This posits architects should neither ignore nor completely embrace digital media. Rather we would urge them to think of themselves as designers who primarily shape social processes, and only second as designers who shape spatial forms. Which social processes underly new commissions? What kind of activities, social interactions or exclusions should a new project encourage or discourage? How can these be shaped through spatial forms? And what roles do digital media play in this? We think architects shouldn’t just build an urban screen just because you can, or the Kunsthaus in Graz has one too. Rather they should start by asking: what kind of social processes do we want to provoke or hope to avoid? Can an urban screen indeed contribute to these processes or will it disturb them? What other disciplines do we need to invite to the table to meaningfully program an urban screen so that it goes beyond mere window dressing and indeed enhances the project?

Architecture and new media

Now let us work out this argument in more detail. But first a small aside. Some might quickly object that our initial questions have already been superseded. After all, architects and urbanists have long embraced digital media in their professional practice. They have been quick to employ computers and other digital media technologies as instruments in the design process itself (computer-aided design), and to create new visualizations. Initially simply as an addition to- and replacement of hand-drawing and modeling. Later the processing power of computers was used to calculate new spaces that would otherwise not have been possible. This would lead to a second phase in the relationship between spatial design and new media, namely the creation of spatial forms that reflected the rise of the digital age. A new visual language emerged in spatial design that explored the semantics of new media. In addition, new media (and in particular ‘virtual reality’) were seen as a new spatial realm that could be shaped by a ‘virtual architecture’.

Yet we believe a new phase has ushered in. This phase is characterized by increasing overlap and integration of digital space and physical space. Rather than being a separate realm of their own (labelled by terms like cyberspace, virtual reality, digital domain, and so on), new media technologies – and mobile media in particular – have become an inseparable part of everyday life. Internet-enabled mobile phones, GPS navigation, entry cards with integrated RFID chips, CCTV cameras, media facades, and so on are embedded in the urban fabric (see our 2008 conference text).

We propose that this new phase impels architecture to relate to digital media in a new way, beyond merely using them as instruments, to represent their spatial logic in design, or to design for virtual worlds. We have seen three different attitudes towards the emerging hybrid city, that we will now briefly describe.

Ignore

Why wouldn’t architects and planners simply ignore developments in the field of new media? Arguably, new media developments and architecture operate at very different speeds. It often takes many years for an architect or planner to negotiate, design, and build, whereas the design of new media technologies is calculated in months rather than years. Further, the lifecycle of media technologies is often updated every few months, whereas an architect or planner traditionally designs for at least a few decades ahead, if not ‘for eternity’. Why think about how people use Twitter to organize their daily life and meet people, when the services may have ceased to exist or evolved into something completely different by the time the design for an urban square or university campus is finished? Architects, some argue, deal with volumes in space, and should leave digital media out of the equation.

They are wrong, we think. The merging of digital and physical spaces leads to new social and spatial practices. This has a huge impact on spatial practices and spheres such as dwelling and inhabiting, meeting and public space, traveling and mobility, work and provisioning, and leisure. The design of these spatial domains has traditionally been the core business of architects and planners. Any changes in these fields therefore directly affect their work and cannot be ignored.

Embrace

Perhaps then, architects and planners should embrace new media and try to integrate the digital domain seamlessly into the design of physical space? Architects build for people, and if people want to use new media technologies, the architect should try to optimize their personalized media-experience of urban space. Architects should use the latest technologies to shape their designs. Spaces can be stuffed with sensors that make ‘smart’ analyses of the environment so that they can respond to changing circumstances. Surfaces can be conceived of as potential pixel space for interactivity, so that surroundings can be personalized and adapted by their users. This is the ‘information age’ and architecture should express that in any possible form. Architects should not only build for the streets, but also for the screen. This response is the exact opposite of ignoring. But isn’t this over-enthusiastic stance ignoring the fact that media practices are profoundly influencing social behavior in physical space, yet not necessarily always for the better? And what remains of the valuable differences between spatial design and media design?

Critical engagement

Or can spatial design professionals relate in a third way to the ubiquity of new media in the (urban) landscape? Can they find a space of their own which neither rejects nor fully embraces these developments? We propose they can, and should, by taking a stance of ‘critical engagement’. This proposition does not just mean taking a reconciliatory position somewhere in the middle of this – admittedly somewhat caricatural – spectrum between ignoring and embracing.

The attitude of ‘critical engagement’ implies a self-reflective take on the profession of spatial design itself. For us – as relative outsiders with an interest in new media, urban culture and identity – architecture is foremost a discipline that provides spatial structures for social processes. It is a profession that literally sets the stage for the social interactions of everyday life.

The main question architects should ask themselves is how new media technologies alter the social processes behind spatial interventions? For example, is housing still the same when the home is no longer a retreat with four walls and a roof, but penetrated by all sorts of media which bring in formerly separated domains like work, leisure, meeting, and even (virtual) travel? And inversely, to what extent does ‘habitation’ become mobile, invading other domains as people increasingly dwell in the familiarity of their mobile media devices and networks which they take anywhere they go? Media-technologies form a third leg in the traditional expertise of architecture: to shape social processes by means of physical interventions.

Media practices turn this dyad into a triangular relationship: man + environment + media. Position 1 (ignore) emphasizes the relation between man + environment but ignores the fact that social processes in physical space are increasingly mediated by technologies. Position 2 (embrace) emphasizes the relation between man + media, yet loses sight of the importance of physical context for media use. Position 3 takes this triangular relationship as its point of departure. On the one hand architects have to come up with new design solutions for these changing social practices. On the other hand they can also influence these mediated social practices through physical design interventions: directing, discouraging, stimulating alternatives, commenting on them, and so on.

Challenge 1: Who sets the normative framework?

This makes architecture a highly normative discipline. Although architects cannot determine what happens in the spaces they design (and few if any still care to do so), they do set up a prescriptive environment that might invoke, encourage or prohibit particular interactions, experiences or moods. In our view this is no longer possible without at least some basic insights in the way digital media have made their way into the urban fabric and the practices of daily life.

We realize that this design practice always has to carefully maneuver between multiple and often conflicting stakeholders and interests, intended activities and events, and the character of specific sites and contexts. Architects face difficult questions about their position in relation to clients and the people they design for, the proposed uses and activities of places, and the quality of space and environment. New media practices make this process of defining stakeholders, activities, and spatial context far more complicated. Why? More often than before new media practices involve stakeholders who are not physically present. Unforeseen uses and events may arise from new developments in media, like for instance ‘smart mobs’: gatherings of people coordinated by mobile media. And the definition of context and spatial quality is challenged by new media practices like ‘geotagging’ whereby people can inscribe places with digital representations and are able to do realtime database queries for related places.

This is all quite abstract so let’s look at an example. Suppose an architect or planner is involved in designing some public space, say a park. Who are the stakeholders involved and what are their interests? What activities might take place there? What qualities should that public place have? The client, a local municipality, will want to combine a pleasant public service with some level of institutional control to prevent loitering, pollution, etc. The public may want a place were they can relax, but some also want a place to work and meet. The planner must find a position vis-a-vis the public’s wish for leisure and connectivity (e.g. by installing benches, free wireless internet, and electricity), institutional control (e.g. by somehow limiting access to wireless infrastructure, installing CCTV cameras, or uncomfortable benches that cannot be used long), and stimulating the public character of the park (e.g. by discouraging individual media consumption altogether).

Moreover, the stakeholders do not solely consist of the municipality and a heterogeneous public, but also of the wireless internet provider, the technical repair staff, the security agency monitoring the park behind screens, and even theaters, cafés and shops in the vicinity that might be affected by the media-consumption and online buying habits of the now-connected public. Similarly, free wireless internet may shift the intended activities of the park from being a local public meeting place for co-existence towards a place for individualized networking on a potentially global scale. This in turn influences the quality of a park as a specific public setting. If people use Twitter and Facebook to post that they are in the park, will they be more likely to meet acquaintances or strangers there? Moreover, the representation and quality of the park may be largely outside of the planner’s hands when people upload and share their experiences of that place online.

So, who exactly sets the design criteria, and the values they imply? Are architects to carry out the wishes of their clients? Do they play a part in shaping them in concordance with their clients? What role do external parties play, such as regulatory bodies? Should architects raise their voice in the broader public debate about the values they play a part in shaping or enforcing?

A further challenge is the relation of the architect with the client. We are well aware that the design profession is to a large extent a ‘messy’ business, where ideals and actual practice more often than not diverge rather than run in parallel. How can an architect sell these stories about new media to a client who just wants a house, or a park? We realize that our argument is not just about convincing the architect of the necessity for ‘critical engagement’ with new media, but also about educating the client. This is an important issue for the future as well, not just for the architect but also for The Mobile City.

Challenge 2: Control or open up?

Another challenge that looms is simply not to get carried away by all the new possibilities and rhetoric of smart technologies. So far we have been talking about the design of social processes, yet one could argue that this is also a dangerous path. To what extent do architects really want to direct these social processes? What level of control does one strive for? Should architects – with the help of for environmental psychologists and security experts – design for a precisely prescribed specific effect? Or should the outcome left open? Should architects design open systems that can be adopted to multiple uses? We’d argue for the latter. The city should not be turned into a collection of friction-free non-places but rather continue to allow for what Mark Weiser has called ‘seamful’ experiences.

We agree with Adam Greenfield’s suggestion (in an interview with The Mobile City) that it would be much better to merely provide ‘a service framework that is subtle and unobtrusive, yet robust and open enough so that people can reach in, grab it and use it’. Of course it can be an interesting proposal to try to ‘nudge’ behavior in a certain direction. Yet systems should be open enough to allow for unforeseen uses and adaptation by the public.

This issue is particular important with regard to new media design in a spatial context. In many instances of urban computing, unspoken cultural codes or legal codes are hardened into software code. And where the soft systems of culture and even the code of law are somewhat malleable (officer, can you please make an exception?), if a particular protocol on for instance who is allowed access or not is established in the soft- or hardware, one has to be (or hire) a hacker to get a temporary exception.

These are also questions we will continue to pose to ourselves. One of the future aims of The Mobile City is to look for ‘best practices’ (or total failures) within the field of architecture itself, in order to learn from them, and be able to provide clearer answers.

New directions and chances

One of the things we noticed during this ‘Day of the Young Architect’ is that many architects appear to feel threatened by the new media realm which is encroaching upon their profession. New media which increasingly operate in physical contexts challenge architecture’s traditional monopoly in shaping social processes through the design of physical spaces. Yet we believe there are also new chances and opportunities for architects and planners.

First, we already witness that the profession is flexibly adapting itself to new circumstances. Architecture is moving in the direction of what has been called ‘service design’. This means that a client hires a ‘designer’ not to just build him a beautiful building, but to shape a particular process or ‘customer (or ‘citizen’) experience’ from start to end. The question is how can these two structures – physical situations and media practices – be combined to design for urban experiences in meaningful ways? Surely this question cannot be solved by architects alone. Architects are increasingly working together with other professional disciplines, such as software engineers, sociologists, structural engineers, media theorists and philosophers. (See for instance Dan Hill’s talk with Carlo Ratti for an elaboration of this theme, and his recent response to the exhibition Toward the Sentient City). Depending on the assignment architects sometimes are but one of the players in such multidisciplinary teams, while sometimes they can take the lead.

Second, architects harness spatial expertise that can steer future directions of new media. Digital media developments are increasingly being integrated with geographical space, physical context, and the material world (labelled geo-spatial web, locative media, the internet of things, and so on). We think it is important that architects play a role in the debate about the values that are implied in such media designs. As experts in what Dan Hill calls ‘spatial intelligence’, architects can contribute important insights to the discussions what directions new media developments should head.

Architects might engage in methods of ‘critical design’, where the main aim of a project is to tease out the tensions, power relations and other issues at play in particular constellations of architecture, digital media and urbanism. So instead of feeling threatened by new media, why shouldn’t architecture boldly enter this field and enrich it with its own expertise? One example is ‘information architecture’ as a way to spatially represent complex information. The large majority of people think spatially. As datasets are growing in size and complexity there is a great opportunity for spatial professionals to manage and visualize digital information.

Conclusion

Spatial design starts from particular goals and seeks different channels to engage stakeholders – ranging from interventions in space to the design of information services and the structuring of organizational processes. ‘Critical engagement’ with digital media, we feel, not necessarily translates into interventions in the physical city. Rather it should involve thinking about the city as a complex of social processes that are partly brought about by new media practices and partly by physical processes.

This hybridization of the city – and its consequences for urban professionals – is something The Mobile City will continue to research and address. We believe this opens new opportunities for architects. Some may choose to pursue what they do best: the design of physical volumes and spaces –albeit as part of multidisciplinary teams perhaps led by ‘Master Designers’. Others might try to shape the design process at large themselves, a new incarnation of the idea of the ‘master builder’, and direct the process in which multiple disciplines come together. Whatever they choose, we are convinced that future architecture is at its best when it critically engages with digital media developments.