Tech for Transit: Designing a Future System

In November 2010, Latitude Research and Next American City launched a study to investigate how new technologies and information access can improve transit and other life experiences. Specifically, the study sought to uncover how cities, transportation providers and technology companies can work together to develop these information-based solutions and, ultimately, encourage adoption of more sustainable transit.

A 3-part discussion of study findings will be published at www.latd.com over the next few weeks (first installment already available), and the PDF report can be accessed directly at http://latd.tv/Transit/Tech-For-Transit-Summary.pdf

Mapping Main Street is a project funded by public media to tell “radio stories” in a new way.  While the core of the project was a content team that traveled over 14,000 miles documenting main streets across the country.  They then built an open platform that allowed others to tell the story of their hometown Main Streets.  This has resulted in hundreds of photojournalists, writers and artists using the platform to represent their community on a broad national platform.
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Mapping Main Street is a project funded by public media to tell “radio stories” in a new way.  While the core of the project was a content team that traveled over 14,000 miles documenting main streets across the country.  They then built an open platform that allowed others to tell the story of their hometown Main Streets.  This has resulted in hundreds of photojournalists, writers and artists using the platform to represent their community on a broad national platform.

Real World Games for Change Challenge

Entry is open for submissions for the Real World Games for Change Challenge - a collaboration between Games for Change and the Come Out and Play Festival.

Entries due by April 15.

They say:

The Come Out & Play Festival and Games for Change are excited to announce a joint call for a real-world game that will leave a real and positive impact on New York City.  The game will be featured in this summer’s brand new Come Out & Play Summer Series of street games running in downtown Manhattan at the River to River Festival.  The game will run Sunday June 19, Father’s Day, in New York City.  The designers will then also have the chance to present their design and findings at the Games for Change Festival which opens the following day, June 20, in New York City and runs through June 22.

 

As we do each year at Come Out & Play, we’re looking for the most interesting and innovative real-world games we can help showcase to the world.  For the COaP & Games for Change’s first Real-world Games for Change Challenge, we’re looking for a game that will be played out in the real-world, be it on the streets or in a park that leaves the world a slightly better place.  The critical part of your design challenge: include a mechanic that drives players to leave an actual positive change on the area where the game was played.

More here: http://www.comeoutandplay.org/

Community Sourced Parking Space Ap

How it works:

If you’re tired of losing 30 minutes of your life to the parking-space hunt every time you go out, this is the App for you. What if your friends living downtown said you could park in their driveway while they were at work or gone for the weekend, as long as you were out by an agreed time?

Park Circa connects people who have empty parking spaces during a set time to people that need them. We enable coordination between neighbors and friends, so that your community resources are optimized for everyone’s benefit. We help organize and publish parking schedules and we facilitate payment between parties, so that people can find parking when they need it and where they need it. Drivers find a place to park, and space owners make some money on their empty driveways. Everyone wins.

More here: http://www.parkcirca.com/

Openly Local - developing an open and unified way of accessing Local Government information

What is Openly Local?
Openly Local is a place to access data about the workings of your Local Council, without having to poke around through dense, difficult-to-navigate websites
Is that all?
Well, no useful though that would be, the key is to put that information into a structured form, so it can be reused by mash-ups, in data feeds (such as your calendar), or for comparative analysis
Why do this?
We wanted access to this data, and there was no way of getting it, so we scratched our own itch, so to speak.

More here: http://openlylocal.com/

Facebook Urban Hackathon



From Co.Design:

Hoping to Win Over a Town, Facebook Wants to Scrap Its Fortress Vibe

Facebook is moving from tony Palo Alto to blue-collar Belle Haven, and they want to woo residents with community-oriented design.

Some social networks still function better in the flesh, and so, on Saturday, Facebook played host to a massive “design charrette” that brought four bus loads of architects, designers and urban planners together for an all-day cram session devoted to re-imagining Menlo Park’s Belle Haven community, soon-to-be home of the company’s global headquarters.

DOME : A Solution for Soft Infrastructure in our Cities

Reclaimed HOOSIER DOME CanopiesINDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA: The People for Urban Progress will gift the shade structure made from the former roof material of the RCA Dome to the Reagan Park community.  We anticipate that this will be the first of several shade structures and pavilions that will begin to populate several of our city’s parks, ensuring that the public can continue to benefit from this incredible resource. In order to design and implement these structures, collaborating with local designer and urban place-maker Wil D. Marquez of w/purpose seemed timely.  We are thrilled that through AFH and Parking Day, the RCA Dome will have new life and bring new life to the Reagan Park community.

The design of the shades structures considered a visual and performance based urban product. The shade structure was designed with movement in mind. Swiveling and adjusting at several points enable it to adjust easily for seasonal solar angle changes and variation in form. It is the first in a series of RCA Dome structures that will be deployed to local parks as visual way-finders, lighting devices, and unique urban infrastructure.

www.wpurpose.com


smartgeometry 2011

http://www.smartgeometry.org/

Who: A whole bunch of designers

What:  The event will be the key gathering in the year for experimentation, discussion, learning and networking within the emerging community of digital parametrics in the fields of architecture, design, and engineering

Where: This year its in Copenhagen

When: 28th March – 2nd April 2011

Tools: people, knowledge, tools, materials and machines

The Speed Camera Lottery

Who: Kevin Richardson, Winner of Volkswagen’s - “The Fun Theory” project

What:

The winning idea of the fun theory award, submitted by Kevin Richardson, USA. Can we get more people to obey the speed limit by making it fun to do? This was the question Kevin’s idea answered and it was so good that Volkswagen, together with The Swedish National Society for Road Safety, actually made this innovative idea a reality in Stockholm, Sweden.

If you speed, your photo will get taken and the driver will be issued a citation, that money will go into a pot. If you obey the speed limit, your photo will also get taken and you will go into a lottery to win some of the money collected from the speeders.

Where: Stockholm, Sweden

When: 2010

Tools: Speed Cameras, Vizualization, Community Sourced, Data

Source: facebook.com

Street With A View

Street With A View

Who: Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley

What: Street With A View introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View.

On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more… 

Street View technicians captured 360-degree photographs of the street with the scenes in action and integrated the images into the Street View mapping platform. This first-ever artistic intervention in Google Street View made its debut on the web in November of 2008.

An incredible cast of real-life characters contributed their time, energy and talents to creating pseudo-street life on Sampsonia Way. Please check out the scene breakdown, the participant page and the video documentation to learn more about the artists, groups and participants that made Street With A View possible.

Where: Pittsburgh

When: 2008

Tools: Mapping, Google Street View, Crowd Sourced

Snap-Shot-City

Big - Snap-Shot-City 2007

Who: Bonnie Shaw

What: Snap-Shot-City is a simultaneous world wide photographic treasure hunt.

It aims to bring people together on-the-ground and on-line, to celebrate the cities in which we live. It challenges people to open their eyes to the extraordinary; everyday; everywhere, by challenging them to become artists for a day and to create simultaneous fun for our extended social networks all over the world.

We had players set up local events anywhere in the world, and then sign up teams of 5 players. At 2pm local time all around the world, we would hand out lists of categories like “Odd One Out”, “Up Up and Away”, “Time Travel” and “Wrong Side of the Tracks”.

Teams would have 5 hours to explore their city, translate those themes into photographs, upload, map and caption them with a story, and then return to the venue for a giant party that we would like with photos as they came in from around the world.

Where: Global

When: 2006 - 2009

Tools: Crowd Sourced, Games, Storytelling, Mapping, Mobile, Facebook, Web, Social Media

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