active social plastic

On Wednesday night, I gave a talk at "The Influencers" lecture -- as part of the dotdotdot lecture series sponsored by the SVA's Interaction Design MFA program. I talked about Christopher Alexander -- how interaction designers and computer scientists love him but architects hate him. I also included some research I'm doing that links Alexander's early work to early artificial intelligence. My presentation is below, but the PDF version has my notes (you'll want them for the middle of the presentation, when I describe Notes on the Synthesis of Form & A Pattern Language).

Thank you so much to Liz Danzico, chair of the SVA's Interaction Design MFA and her team for inviting me, and the other excellent speakers: Allegra Burnette, Steven Heller and Jason Santa Maria for a stimulating and fun evening.

Greetings from lovely San Jose and the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference! I'm here for the first time since 2004. The talks have been terrific. I had the opportunity to give an Ignite talk (5 minutes! 20 slides!) on pneumatic tubes.

I'm giving a talk today called "Shared and Sometimes Stealthy: India's Mobile Phone"-- it's the result of a study I did at Microsoft Research India in 2006. If you're interested in the topic, there are two chapters that I've published about it. I wrote "Beyond the Personal and Private: Modes of Mobile Phone Sharing in Urban India" with Jonathan Donner of Microsoft Research India. It will be published later this month in The Reconstruction of Space and Time: Mobile Communication Practices (edited by Rich Ling and Scott Campbell). And with Jonathan Donner, Nimmi Rangaswamy, and Carolyn Wei, we wrote "'Express Yourself' and 'Stay Together: The Indian Middle Class Family" in the Handbook on Mobile Communication Studies, edited by James Katz. It discusses of the effect of the mobile phone on several domestic situations: home finances, romance and the domestic boundary.

At South by Southwest, Francesca Birks and I organized a panel called Tangible Interactions in Urban Spaces, where we'll be joined by Ben Cerveny and Mouna Andraos. We're on deck on Sunday at 10 a.m. (early! but very cool!).

Do come to see us -- and if any of these subjects interest you, please follow up with me. I have more material to offer.

(Stepping out of pneumatic tube land and moving forward about 115 years into the major project I did in the 1990s...)

Last week, I attended the opening discussion for A Few Good Zines: Dispatches from the Edge of Architectural Production at Columbia's Studio X in New York. The discussion veered--maybe overmuch--into one about format: online, offline? Broadsheet, stapled, saddle stitched? Can a website be a zine at all?

It made me think of two things: the webzine I ran with three co-founders and the ways that the proliferation of blogging makes such a project less likely.

In 1997, four of us--Janelle Brown, Heather Irwin, Rosemary Pepper and I started Maxi, a pop culture feminist webzine under the motto "Pro woman. Post grrl." We were tired of the media options for women at the time: with very few exceptions (like Bust and Bitch), it seemed that our choices were fashion magazines that talked more about thin thighs and giving men better orgasms, or career sites that weren't much fun to read. Over two months, we planned the first issue, titled Girlfriends. 

Since all of us worked with Internet, technology, design and content in some way, it made more sense for us to build a webzine as opposed to a paper zine or magazine. Given our day jobs, we had electronic resources at our fingertips. We wanted the site to be well-designed and well-written, something that was easier for us to do online than on paper. We wrote, edited, designed and coded and launched the site to acclaim in April 1997, with international press following us throughout the time we published.

In the two and a half years of its existence, Maxi blended elements of magazine, creative web narrative and what would now be called a blog (the Raw Nerve section). We wanted to depict a world that accepted feminism but that had an edge, that was critical about the media, but still appreciated the guilty pleasures of consumer culture. We published themed every few months in which we would totally redesign the interface--they included Girlfriends, Marriage, Sex (also known as the vibrator issue), Technology, and Media.

Maxi was always envisioned as a collaborative effort. The four of us were all a part of the web community in San Francisco and New York from its early days; I knew Rosemary from college, Janelle and Heather had worked together at Wired, I had written for the two of them at another webzine. Our friends Bruce Falck and Simon Smith hosted the site; Peter Merholz wrote a cgi script for managing the table of contents, and Jim Petersen gave us the comments script that allowed us to start conversations with our readers at the end of articles.  We later migrated to a version of PHP BB to run our discussions: it was a vital, comprehensive community. For the most part, we hand coded everything. There was no better tool at hand than our HTML and UNIX knowledge or our Photoshop skills.

One element of Maxi's success is that other like-minded webzines launched around the same time as ours. We founded a network called Estronet that reached out to a small group of them. Bust.com (founded on paper by Deb Stoller and Marcelle Karp), Minx, gURL (founded by Rebecca Odes, Esther Drill and Heather McDonald), Wench (founded by Caterina Fake and Leanne Waldal), Tripod's Women's Room (led by Emma Taylor, one of the major forces behind Nerve.com), and Hues (Ophi and Tali Edut). We had no funding, but Heidi Swanson and Chickclick did: Estronet joined with Chickclick and Maxi's Heather Irwin joined forces with Heidi as its creative director, if I remember right. Chickclick's popularity grew such that it sponsored the 1999 Lilith Fair.

By the time we stopped publishing Maxi in Fall 1999, the face of web content for women had expanded. The edgier voices that Maxi and other sites had put out there had begun to move into the mainstream. And all of this had happened before Peter--the same one who had created our CGI script in 1997--coined the word "blog" (it's in the OED now) in 1999.

I'll pick up that point in my next blog post.

We would have loved to publish quickly and easily on a daily basis. We wanted a content management system (it would have saved the site). In one of our meetings in early 1999, we talked about how we wanting to be able to type in text, upload an image and publish. If we were publishing today, parts of our site would have been a blog. If we had started today, though, what would be be doing?

But what of the collaboration? Would that have happened, and if so, how? I'm not so certain. Would it have had the wide-reaching effect that Maxi and sites like ours had? I don't think it would have. Webzines like ours reflected a vital piece in a period between the personal home page and the blog. And I fear that the standardization that blogging brings about snuffs out some of the possibilities that were at hand in the mid to late 90s.

Where are we all now? Janelle's novel, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything was published last year. Heather is a food, wine and travel writer. Rosemary is a freelance writer. And as you've ascertained, I'm an architecture PhD student (who still writes, cares about digital content, and spent too much of her life online).

I'm in the midst of a bunch of intense writing on the origins of the pneumatic tube network. It's not done yet, but I'll share more here given the recent interest (thanks, Bruce, for the link!).

Introduced to combat the shortcomings of the telegraphic network in Paris, the subterranean Poste Pneumatique (Pneumatic Post) moved written telegraph messages from 1866 until 1984. The pneumatic tube network relieved the saturated telegraph network, delivering physical messages across the city and to the suburbs faster and more reliably than the telegraph. What first began as a one-kilometer line connecting Paris's stock exchange and central telegraph office opened to the public service in 1879, and by 1910 reached all arrondissements and nearby suburbs, contained 210 kilometers of underground tubes, and handled approximately nine million postal telegrams a year. By 1953 at its height, it was 450 km long--the largest in the world--processing more than 11 million pieces a year.

Why did it make sense to send a telegram via pneumatic tube? It was a set of factors related to urban conditions in the 19th century. Cities with high population, heavy commerce and finance and urban congestion made good candidates for pneumatic tube networks. Moreover, in Europe, the pneumatic tube mostly relieved a communication boom caused by inexpensive telegraphy and saturated telegraph networks. Devised as an auxiliary to the telegraph, a medium that could only transmit 40-50 messages of 20 words per hour in 1860, the pneumatic tube network addressed the issue of rapid, reliable communication within the city (though telegraphy still made sense for messages sent over longer distances).

Poste Pneumatique was under the operation of the telegraph office within the postal service, although it only moved physical, written cards and not electric messages. It offered Parisians a quick and reliable method of sending messages across their congested city--something that could not happen with overburdened telegraph lines or on urban streets. To send a "petit bleu," (the one on the right from this collection) as pneumatic messages were known, the sender composed a written message on a card and delivered it to a special Poste Pneumatique mailbox or the nearest post office. There, the postal telegraph desk delivered it via pneumatic tube receptacle to the addressee's closest post office, where a messenger (bicycle or later, motorcycle) would deliver it to the recipient--usually within two hours of its inscription.

By 1870, Paris also had an extensive network of vaulted sewers, built by Baron Haussmann during the Second Empire. The sewers were a natural conduit for other types of infrastructure (potable water, telegraph lines, and eventually electricity), making it easier to install pneumatic tube and compressed air lines and to access them in case of error.

Paris's pneumatic tube network was not the first--that was London, started in 1853) and by no means was it the only one. Urban tube systems existed all over the world, in Europe, North and South America, and Australia. London invented its pneumatic post in 1853. Berlin began its Rohrpost in 1865 and Vienna in 1878 Philadelphia followed suit for first class post in 1893 and New York in 1897. The technology transferred readily and with less competition than might have been expected (Austrian, German and French engineers shared technological improvements).

Urban tube networks existed for a surprisingly long time, remaining in operation until 1953 in New York, 1984 in Paris and 2002 in Prague (where it was only taken out of service by a flood that destroyed much of the tube infrastructure). They fell out of favor for different factors: in the US, the invention of the gasoline-powered truck in 1912 proved competitive; elsewhere, reliable telephone, and later fax service obviated the need for the networks. But still, telecommunication contends with issues of last mile delivery and economies of scale. And as interest in embedded computing grows, of objects imbued with interactivity, there's something extremely attractive about a physical system that shoots a physical message to its addressee.

Via the fabulous Mimi Zeiger, founder and editor of Loud Paper (and who was on the panel on architecture I moderated at 2007 SXSW): an exhibition about the more recent history on architectural zines of the 1990s and beyond. The exhibition and event pick up on little magazines of architecture past the 1960s, a period neatly chronicled and curated by the Princeton architecture students a few years ahead of me in Clip Stamp Fold. I look forward to it!

A Few Zines: Dispatches from the Edge of Architectural Production
January 8-February 28, 2009
Studio-X

In the 1990s, zines such as Lackluster, Infiltration, loud paper, Dodge City Journal and Monorail subverted traditional trade and academic architecture magazine trends by crossing the built environment with art, music, politics and pop culture--and by deliberately retaining and cultivating an underground presence. Much has been made of that decade's zine phenomenon--inspiring academic studies, international conferences and DIY workshops--yet little attention has been paid to architecture zine culture specifically, or its resonance within architectural publishing today.

A Few Zines: Dispatches from the Edge of Architectural Production does both. Rather than attempting to present an exhaustive retrospective of architecture zine culture, it highlights complete runs of several noted zines that began in the nineties. The exhibition also features contemporary publications that continue to draw inspiration from the self-publishing tradition, such as Pin-Up, Sumoscraper, and Thumb.
 
To launch this exhibit, curator Mimi Zeiger has published a new issue of loud paper and organized a party and panel discussion, including:

Luke Bulman, Thumb
Felix Burrichter, Pin-Up
Stephen Duncombe, NYU professor and author of Dream and Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture
Andrew Wagner, Dodge City Journal and currently, American Craft
Mimi Zeiger, loud paper

Moderated by Kazys Varnelis, AUDC

When: Thursday, January 8, 2009, 7 pm
Free and open to the public
RSVP: gdb2106@columbia.edu

Studio-X, 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, New York, NY 10014

Exhibition hours: Tuesday-Saturday, noon-6 pm

Contact: Gavin Browning, Programming Coordinator, Studio-X, (212) 989 2398, gdb2106@columbia.edu

[Studio-X is a downtown studio for experimental research and design run by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University.]

Download A Few Zines Press Release

I've joined interactions magazine, published by the ACM, as a contributing editor. It's a great crew to join, with several friends and co-conspirators on deck: Jon Kolko, Dave Cronin, Marc Rettig, Mark Vanderbeeken, Alex Wright, Hugh Dubberly, Steve Portigal and Elizabeth Churchill. The March/April issue is the first where first where I've written and edited pieces.

In the meantime, the November/December issue is outstanding, with features including "Designing Games: Why And How" by Sus Lundgren, "Design: A Better Path to Interaction," by Nathan Shedroff, "User Experience Design for Ubiquitous Computing" by my very dear friend, Mike Kuniavsky, and Rich Ling's "Taken for Granted: The Infusion of the Mobile Phone in Society."

(Update: if you're interested in pneumatic tubes, I've written more here.)

My big project -- possibly undergirding my dissertation in a year: Postal services and pneumatic tube systems in the late 19th and early 20th century, especially in Paris. I'm reading these services in terms of their urban interfaces, their material qualities and the interest in the 1870s-1890s of physical networks across cities. Paris is interesting because of an explosion of postal and telegraph products and services, the response to the siege of the city (Balloon Post!), and the shift from electric to material form to someone's doorstep in terms of message delivery. The Hôtel des Postes fascinates because of its ingenious interfaces within the building and its processing capability; the pneumatic tubes are fascinating because they make manifest the force of air and use it to literally propel information across a building or a city.

During the same four-year period when the word "interface" was first used, in which the notion of networks proliferated, Julien Guadet (1834-1908) designed the Hôtel des Postes (1880- 1884) in Paris, the central office for the French postal network. An enormous civic architectural undertaking, the Hôtel des Postes sorted, moved, marked, placed in sacks, audited, loaded and transported letters, periodicals and packets at high speeds, before sending them out again to their destinations. For Guadet and bureaucratic chronicler of Paris Maxime Du Camp, La Poste represented a living system that they described in anthropomorphic terms. Guadet described the postal system as epileptically fast; du Camp compared it to a heart that "draws in its correspondence and forces it back out to distribute in every direction." Beyond these biological comparisons, however, Guadet designed the Hôtel des Postes to operate as an ordinateur--a computer processor--atop the postal network. The Hôtel des Postes represents a nascent, modern approach to designing buildings, one that translated organizational, functional requirements into form.


Fueling communication through pipes that ran under cities at speeds of up to 50 km per hour, the pneumatic post served as an urban subterranean communication network from the 1850s into the early 21st century, first in Europe, then the United States, and by the early 20th century, South America and Australia. Depending on the city, pneumatic tubes shuttled telegrams or letters and packages, both commercial and personal, as an antidote to increasing urban congestion and traffic on the streets above. Messages delivered by pneumatic dispatch surfaced in post offices and train stations, where messengers carried them by bicycle (or later, motorcycle or truck) from the post or telegraph branch to their final destinations.   For commercial buildings, pneumatic tubes offered ready communication systems between and within any enterprises that required the movement of receipts and paper. At once buried and tangled, emerging into the interiors of buildings and offering varied interfaces for its users, the pneumatic tube presents an enigmatic image of modernity--the merger of construction and communication.

Pneumatic networks preceded electrification, first powered by steam and only by electricity in the early 20th century. They enjoyed a long lifespan. Implemented first in London in 1853 as an information conduit between the London Stock Exchange and the Central Post Office, the technology quickly transferred to other cities. Berlin began its Rohrpost in 1865; Paris built its first pneumatic networks in 1866 and began public Poste Pneumatique in 1879; Philadelphia followed suit for first class post in 1893 and New York in 1897. Urban tube networks existed for a surprisingly long time, remaining in operation until 1953 in New York, 1984 in Paris and 2002 in Prague (where it was only taken out of service by a flood that destroyed much of the tube infrastructure).

I must admit, I'm surprised to find myself heading toward a 19th century dissertation topic, and at that, one that deals with France. But working on tubes and postal services lets me explore the things that I love about tangible networks and interfaces. They make me realize just how much we have to learn from these old and often forgotten modes of transmission.

Reading through the August 1929 Dun's International Review ("A Journal for the Promotion of Trade" that ran until 1931), I ran into this editorial. Interesting to see US trade seeing the notion of trend and styling as something that needed to be controlled and standardized in order to help produce profits, but also in order to be profitable. It reminds me of contemporary conversations on style and trending (Zara, anyone?)

Style in Industry

Manufacturers must be on their mettle these days to meet the demands of a smart and quick-thinking public. This public knows what it wants and keeps an eye open for new trends in style and design in all kinds of articles, ranging from the daitiest of garments to kitchen stoves and industrial machinery. So important have manufacturers found these factors that some have established departments to watch movements in style and design and develop new ones themselves, when the occasion warrants.

Recognizing that many manufacturers are injecting the element of beauty into even the most common articles of daily use, a survey of this general movement has been made by the Policyholders' Service Bureau of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, the results of which have been published in a brochure under the title, 'The Use of Style and Design in Industry.' In discussing the general situation surrounding the trend toward developing style and design, the booklet states that, although new styles and designs are absorbing a greater proportion of production, and despite th fact that these new styles and designs are appearing at an accelerated pace, investigation shows that apparently there has been very little developed in the way of a regular procedures to control, coordinate and direct that production of these new styles and designs so that the undertaking shall be a profitable one. The act is appreciated that the adoption of new styles and designs cannot be placed on a mathematical basis, but the risks now taken by American business are inordinately great.

American business has long been characterized by the freest exchange of information, even among competitors [...] But the literature on styling is scanty and  fragmentary. If progress is to be made in the successful utilization of style and design as factors in producing profits, the first step would seem to be the consideration of hte styling process, as it is undertaken in various types of industrial establishments. Just how is the styling developed? How are styles launched and how are they controlled once in production? It will not be long then before best practices and standards are developed in a field that is still open to guesswork and snap judgment.