John Finley

• 2011-06-22

  Videos from OPEN IxD: the 2011 MFA Interaction Design Festival are up on the vimeos.

• 2011-02-23

  Let Me Tell You About Locus

  Locus is a tool which encourages residents to participate in the community building process.

  Communities using Locus can deploy a survey which allows residents to pinpoint the issues which matter to them in their community. Through a web-based application, residents can mark up maps and answer questions in an effort to provide their local knowledge & solve community challenges.

  In doing so, they feel more involved in the process and more responsible for the solution. Showing these issues to community leaders allows them to work more effectively with planners and developers in identifying solutions.

  With this in place, a community can better organize itself such that it can:

  • respond to these issues in a more proactive way
  • define long term goals
  • utilize the unique strengths of both residents and city experts in solving these problems

• 2011-02-21

  

  Nothing important here. Just a city that my computer made for me.

• 2011-02-09

  

  I’ll be at Interaction’11 all week. This is the “just OK” view from my hotel room.

• 2011-01-30

  Towards A Community Vision

  Speaking with Cassim last week got my mind thinking in a few interesting directions. Here I’ve taken a first stab at my thoughts on the new model of interaction I’m developing: one in which resident participation shapes the future of a community.

  Participation Leads to Success

  Change in a neighborhood happens through community meetings. This process is centralized and the methods used make it hard for many people to get involved. My project attempts to change the processes used in hopes that this will lead to greater participation within communities.

  I define participation as the marriage of professional experience and local knowledge. When city officials, developers, and residents come together they can arrive at better solutions.

  Participation in any form happens too late in today’s process. And sourcing that local knowledge is difficult, but can yield positive results for both the community and the developer. So how do we fix this?

  A Neighborhood Charter

  I think one way to achieve higher levels of resident buy-in is by having them create & share their ideas of what their community could be. In doing so, citizens can merge their deep local knowledge with that of professionals. This sort of forward thinking is not unlike the charters enacted by cities. Let’s build charters for neighborhoods.

  This chartering process could be an ongoing and evolving activity in which residents take part. This process should be interactive. At a high level, it should:

  • show residents that they can expect things from their community, and that things will be expected of them
  • teach residents the realities of building
  • help manage expectations among all parties
  • show developers that their customers are well-informed

  More than anything else, it should encourage the kind of participation which makes the most of the change inherent in any community.

• →

  An Interview With Cassim Shepard

  I had the opportunity to speak to Cassim Shepard the on Thursday. Cassim is probably best known as founder and editor of the Architectural League of New York’s Urban Omnibus publication. Speaking to Cassim shined a light on many of the gaps present in my thesis concept.

  Too Late For Design

  I first thought that I could work exclusively with citizens to showcase potential design concepts. I learned early on in our conversations that the community reviews take place only after final designs has been developed; people weren’t discussing multiple options – they were discussing final renderings.

  If people were going to have a stake in the design process, design was going to have to happen much earlier on.

  It’s All About Participation

  When I asked Cassim about his thoughts on participation, he referenced Carl Skelton, creator of Betaville:

  Participation is a coalition of two different registers of confidence: professional intelligence and deep, local knowledge.

  Which is a fantastic way to frame my idea getting citizens more invested in the future of their neighborhood. I’d like to see all of these different camps coming together and form a community that is sustainable, achievable, and livable. Amending the adversarial and obtuse relationship is the first place to start.

• 2011-01-24

  Welcome to the Map Room

  In our thesis class last week, we spent time publicly hashing out what our current status is and the various problems we were encountering.

  I mentioned that I wanted to take a big step back and review the core of my idea. Paul suggested that might be a bit drastic, and that my reservations about having a concept with too narrow an audience were unfounded. To paraphrase, he said that he was more concerned with having a concept that totally succeeds for a niche audience than one which is partially successful for a larger one. This was a big relief for many of us, and echoed my sentiments about where we should be heading as a class.

  Another recommendation from Paul was to “find a room full of maps” and lock myself in for a few hours. This weekend I was able to do just that. I visited the New York Public Library’s Map Division on Friday and Saturday.

  The Map Division at the Schwarzman Building is truly a wonderful place, and I could spend a whole post talking about it. But research first! I spent my time exhausting their public book collection, looking for titles primarily about city planning, urban design, communities and public policy, and so forth. I found quite a bit, and that was just on my own; I plan on going back and enlisting the help of the staff now that I know better what I’m looking for.

  The next few days will see me chewing up and making sense of what I’ve found over the last two days. For now, I’ll leave you with a list of some Map Room highlights, for posterity:

  • Rethinking the Power of Maps
  • Street Mapping
  • Beyond Maps: GIS and Decision Making in Local Government
  • Making Community Connections: The Orton Family Foundation Community Mapping Program
  • Community Geography: GIS in Action
  • Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History
  • Cybercartography: Maps and Mapping in the Information Era. Cartographica. Volume 41, Issue 1.
  • Supporting Map-based Geocollaboration Through Natural Interfaces to Large-Screen Displays. Cartographic Perspectives. Number 54, Spring 2006.

• 2010-12-27

  

  Handout for Locus, the Urban Planning Concept

• →

  End of Semester Process

  I figure I might write a bit about how the Urban Planning Concept has matured in the time spent since my last post. (But be sure to keep in mind that while it has been a few weeks in chronological time, I only had three days to work on this due to other schoolwork.)

  Judging from the feedback I received last time, I knew that my idea needed a better foundation. I dived back into my research to find out what it was about this idea that made it stand out to me. I took this bundle and began to filter, sort, and edit. This is what remained:

  • City literacy
  • Interactions meaningful to a specific location
  • Many small actions leading to a big change
  • Side-effect interaction
  • 25% of NYC is covered in streets
  • The city, calling out to the resident
  • Doorways and thresholds
  • Psychogeography: the effects of geographical setting, consciously arranged or not, acting on the mood or behavior of a person
  • Synechdote: the part representing the whole
  • Macroscope: something that helps up see what the aggregation of many small actions looks like when added together

  As part of my research, I looked back on what I thought my thesis was going to be early on. In an email to my department chair dated in April of this year, I said:

  I'm interested in the ways people are shaped by the built and natural environments that surround them.

  To that end, I’ve been thinking about urban planning. As far as I can tell, there are two main schools of thought: top down and bottom up. Top down is about imposing design upon a place. Bottom up is about letting design follow the need. Things seem to be trending towards bottom-up at the moment.

  I had been previously focused on making a better map, but know I believe that direction to be not quite correct. I think that my thesis can be more successful if I find a way to make maps work better for people.

  I also knew that I wanted to get away form the concept as a website. Websites simply exist, and are only available where people can spend the time to reach them. The barrier of entry for getting someone to visit a site is pretty high. A screen in the environment itself, however, is there. It is much more prominent, and its location on the corner lends it some amount of credibility and authority.

  And I wanted to use that authority to educate. I don’t expect that people will be lining up to use this interface to type in messages or enter in their personal information. I do think it could be a place for teaching people as they pass by or wait for the light to change.

• 2010-12-18

  Two Ways To Plan

  In looking into how urban planing works, I’ve begun to take the whole industry practice and break it down. My hope is by classifying and defining each part, I’ll be better able to spot trends and places where my work can fit in.

  The two major ways of thinking about planning are top-down and bottom-up. Top-down is a way of imposing a design upon a place, where a bottom-up approach seeks to find a more holistic design based on empirical information. I’ll be looking more in depth at two bottom-up approaches I’ve come across in my work.

  City Literacy

  One way to go about it is to find the essence of the place. Dive in, observe, and experience it. Then report. After reading Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City, I’ve been toying with this romantic ideal of what it is like to explore a city.

  Lynch balances pragmatism and creativity to great effect. Within his descriptions, he decomposes a whole city into paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. He performed thorough studies of the city’s residents, probing them to define their location—even asking them to describe the way their neighborhood smelled.

  [You can find a fantastic introduction to Lynch’s Boston here.]

  Lynch was seeking city literacy. He wanted to know a city well enough to give directions to strangers in every neighborhood. He wanted to describe his current location by the quality of limestone used in local masonry. And by the time he wrapped up his tenure at MIT, he had amassed such a body of knowledge I bet he could do just that.

  P2P Urbanism

  A more contemporary thought is ‘P2P Urbanism’. Coined—as far as I can tell—by Nikos Salingaros at the University of Texas at San Antonio, P2P Urbanism gives people the decision-making and concept-generation abilities needed to affect change in their own environment.

  Largely a reaction against large-scale development, P2P Urbanism feels that patterns are the future, that every idea counts, and co-creation with planners yields the best outcomes. From Salingaros’ PDF on the subject:

  Lots of people have big ideas that may not work (e.g. “they should make all of downtown pedestrian!”), yet everyone has small ideas that are almost certain to work (“that derelict sidewalk could very well be a tiny garden”; “that bus stop could really use a simple roof”). It is hard to find like-­‐minded people who, once grouped together, may actually turn thought into action. It would then be useful to know about similar projects that have succeeded or failed. The dissemination of knowledge would tell everyone the current state of the practice of urbanism, where lots of central planning is invariably bad, academia is fixated on improvable philosophies, and money-­‐oriented development rules without any controls.

  Moving Forward

  I’m trying to find a balance between these two approaches in my own work. I love the emotion, the immediacy, and, frankly, the romance with witch Lynch imagines a city. P2P Urbanism seems like a great way to get the people involved, or at least make the whole process seem less confrontational.

  However, his work may not be the most practical when it comes to smaller-scale problems and issues which are not concerned about city typology. And Salingaros’ assumption that every idea deserves a fair shot seems to be defeated when viewed through the lens of red tape and political interests.