Archive for June 16th, 2010

It’s early days over at Nimble Cities, but the ideas are coming in fast and furious (click here to see the most popular so far).

There’s some good proposals already, a mix of pragmatism and futurism, wild-eyed rants and thoughtfully considered suggestions. One thing I’m not seeing a lot of though is already existing ideas, in cities around the world, that should be extended to other metropoles. But I trust these will emerge as ideas and voting continues.

Photo by Stanza/Flickr

Over at Gerry Gaffney’s User Experience podcast, there’s an interesting conversation with Adam Greenfield (among other things, a user experience designer at Nokia) that takes a brief turn towards transportation:

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about something that I’ve been calling transmobility. And I go into this to some degree in the new book, “The city is here for you to use”, the notion that once you take a vehicle, or any other object, and you make of it a networked resource, it’s no longer an object anymore, it becomes something with the nature of a service, it becomes something that you can schedule, something that you can share, something that has a presence on the network and is capable of locating itself, and you can book it or swap it or any of the other operations that you can perform on a networked piece of data you can now perform on that physical vehicle.

So yes, absolutely one of the things Urbanscale is interested in doing is the next generation of network shared bicycle systems.

Lovely word, that: Insufflate. But I was intrigued by Greenfield’s concepts (and thought they’d be suitable for the Nimble Cities project), which, I should say, are somewhat in spirit with the “mobility internet” as envisioned by Bill Mitchell and the other authors of Reinventing the Automobile (and please turn here or here for remembrances of Mitchell, by two friends of his, and mine; I didn’t know Mitchell but had engaged with his work on various occasions).

And I wonder if there’s some useful metaphor here vis a vis cloud computing; instead of just having one’s application (e.g. music library) running native on one’s own device (limited in memory, etc.), one can gain access to a shared music library as one needs, where one needs, through the cloud, for an arguably richer experience in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

I hereby trademark the phrase: “Cloud commuting.”