Info about our Women’s Strike week schedule here.
You needn’t read all of these texts closely; you’re welcome to skim through. Your primary goals are to create a mental inventory of potential forms of output, and to generate ideas – in particular, potential concrete forms – for your own projects. Then, as you’ll see below, you’ll need to choose one example for analysis.
- Adam Rothstein, “The Cities Science Fiction Built,” Motherboard (April 20, 2015).
- Shannon Mattern, “Interfacing Urban Intelligence,” Places Journal (April 2014).
- Shannon Mattern, “Infrastructural Tourism,” Places Journal (July 2013).
- Shannon Mattern, “Cloud and Field,” Places Journal (August 2016).
- Jentery Sayers, “Kits for Cultural History,” Hyperrhiz 13 (Fall 2015) – and skim through the other articles in this special issue on “Kits, Plans, Schematics.”
- Christine Gaspar, “Images of the City: The Work of the Center for Urban Pedagogy” and Kadambari Baxi and Irene Cheng, “Citizenship by Design” in Miodrag Mitrasinovic, ed., Concurrent Urbanities: Designing Infrastructures of Inclusion (New York: Routledge, 2016): 76-86, 114-23.
- Check out the work of Public Lab, the Extrapolation Factory, the Environmental Health Clinic + Lab, and the NearFutureLab.
Due Before/In Class: Each of you should choose one precedent project – a kit, plan, performance, method, etc. (either featured in the readings for this week or inspired by the readings) that has some spatial-intelligence interest at its core. Assess…
- its subject matter or purview;
- its underlying epistemology and methodology (i.e., how does it frame “intelligence,” “knowledge,” or “smartness,” and the means by which it’s acquired?);
- how its format or mode of execution serves, or fails to serve, its purposes; and
- its weaknesses or unexplored critical dimensions.
Please post your ~600-word analysis (with links and illustrations!) to our class website before class, and be prepared to share your work in a five-minute (max!) informal in-class presentation. Then, over the course of the next week, please review your classmates’ posts and offer thoughtful, substantial (at least a couple sentences!) responses to two.
Image: Thomas Hawk, Carson Mansion, via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0
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Supplemental Resources:
- Carl Abbott, Imagining Urban Futures: Cities in Science Fiction and What We Might Learn from Them (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2016).
- Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
- Jennifer Gabrys, “Smart Cities as Sustainable Cities: A Visual Essay,” Society & Space (2014)
- Kevin Gaunt, “Bots – Collaborative AI for the Smart Home,” Core 77 (2016).
- Carla Leitão and Ed Keller, “Drive,” Volume 49: Learning Network (November 2016).
- Jennifer Light, “Taking Games Seriously,” Technology and Culture 49 (2008): 347-75.
- Museum der Dinge’s “Object Lesson: The Story of Material Education in 8 Chapters” exhibition and the exhibition texts.
- Gillian Rose, “Top Ten Tips for Making a Smart City Promotional Video,” Visual/ Method/Culture (September 19, 2016).
- Various Urban Dashboards.
- More Test Kits: blood tests, drug ID tests, Octavia Butler’s “survival kits,” pool tests, pregnancy tests, rape kits, water tests