Adam Greenfield
Interessante enrevista com Adam Greenfield no The Mobile City sobre “designing for urban space”. Entrevista conduzida por Martijn de Waal Greenfield coordenda o setor de designer de interface da Nokia e está escrevendo o livro “The City Is Here For You To Use: Urban form and experience in the age of ubiquitous computing”.
Trechos da entrevista:
“(…) This turns out to be an important challenge when is a city is being represented digitally. There might well be some slippage between the subjective, everyday notion of a city, the juridical domain that constitutes the formal municipality, and the geolocative framework we use to access data about that place. You can be psychologically in Amsterdam, but legally somewhere else and technically in one of the two, or in none at all.
(…) Concrete example: think of the GPS systems that incorporate real-time traffic data. As you drive through the city and encounter successive decision points along your route, at each step of the way you’re able to make a choice based on the actual, immediate state of the system you’re immersed in. This closes the loop, vests the power in your hands, redresses information asymmetry. And that state information – which, by the way, your own actions are a constituent of – has been represented in such a way that you can use it to make better decisions: left or right, freeway or surface streets, optimized for time or for energy consumption or for cost.
(…) Or another example: who names the categories that we measure? For instance, Stamen’s Oakland Crimespotting project gives a very vivid sense of where street crime is happening in that city. But in considering it, we should always remember that it is the police department and the juridical code they enforce that define, for these purposes, what constitutes a crime. They define the taxonomy of criminal acts, and often this will not mesh with the public’s perception. For instance, the Oakland PD chooses to not break rape out as a separate category. Rape is folded up with the aggravated assault figures, and so it never appears in the visualizations. If you’d allowed a bottom-up reporting of crimes by citizens’ groups, on the other hand, or by the victims of crime, you would end up with a completely different map of the city. This is absolutely crucial for us to keep in mind as we encounter these compelling visualizations.