Interactivity For An Urban Digital Experience

This is the third and last of a series of posts about a new urban digital experience in the streets of Yonkers, New York. [You can the previous posts, click on part1 and part2.]

As a reminder, the two main goals of this project are:

  • To enhance the street life of the city by offering delightful destinations and interesting experience, a new kind of urban design
  • To engage, entertain, educate and reinforce the image of Yonkers as an historic center of innovation and to inspire the creativity of its current residents

We started out with a wide variety of content that entertains, educates and reinforces the residents’ understanding of their city. As the City government takes over full control of this, the next phase will be about deepening the engagement and interactivity with pedestrians – what will really make this a new tool of urban design.

This post is devoted to just a few of the possible ways that a digital experience on the streets can become more interactive.

First, a note about equipment and software. I’ve mentioned the high-quality HD projectors and outdoor speakers. I haven’t mentioned the cameras that are also installed. Those cameras have been used so far to make sure that the system is operating properly. But the best use of cameras is as one part of seeing – and with the proper software – analyzing what people are doing when they see the projections or hear something.

The smartphones that people carry as they pass by also allow them to communicate via websites, social media or even their movement.

With all this in place, it helps to think of what can happen in these four categories:

  1. Contests
  2. Control of Text
  3. Physical Interaction
  4. Teleportation

Contests

What’s your favorite part of the city? Show a dozen or so pictures and let people vote on them – and show real time results. It’s not a deeply significant engagement, but it will bring people out to show support for their area or destination.

Or people can be asked: what are your top choices in an amateur poetry contest (which only requires audio) or the best photography of the waterfront or a beautiful park or the favorite item that has been 3D printed inside the library’s makerspace? Or???

Even the content itself can be assessed in this way. We can ask passersby to provide thumbs up or down for what it is they are seeing at that moment. (Since the schedule of content is known precisely this means that we would also know what the person was referring to.)

People could vote on what kind of music they would want to hear at the moment, like an outdoor jukebox, or on what videos they might want to see at the moment.

Contests of this kind are a pretty straightforward use of either smartphones or physical gestures. Cameras can detect when people point to something to make a choice. It is possible to use phone SMS texting to register votes and the nice thing about this use of SMS is that it doesn’t require anyone to edit and censor what people write since they can only select among the (usually numerical) choices they’re given. SMS voting can be supplemented with voting on a website.

Control Of Text

Control implies that the person in front of a site can control what’s there merely by typing some text on a smart phone – or eventually by speaking to a microphone that is backed by speech recognition software.

People can ask about the history of people who have moved to Yonkers by typing in a family name, which then triggers an app that searches the local family database.

This kind of interaction requires that someone or a service provides basic editing of the text provided by people (i.e., censorship of words and ideas not appropriate for a site frequented by the general public).

Physical Interaction

With software that can understand or at least react to the movement of human hands, feet and bodies, there are all kinds of possible ways that people can interact with a blended physical/digital environment.

In a place like Getty Square where the projectors point down to the ground, it’s possible to show dance steps. Or people can modify an animation or visual on a wall by waving their arms in a particular way.

Originally in Australia, but now elsewhere, stairs have been digitized so that they play musical notes when people walk on them. These “piano stairs” are relatively easy to create and actually don’t really need to be stairs at all – the same effect can be created on a flat surface and it doesn’t have to generate piano sounds only.

In Eindhoven, the Netherlands, there is an installation called Lightfall, where a person’s movements control the lighting. See https://vimeo.com/192203302

Pedestrians could even become part of the visual on a wall and using augmented reality even transformed, say into the founder of the city with appropriate old clothes. Again, the only limit is the creativity of those involved in designing these opportunities.

Teleportation

The last category I’m calling teleportation, although it’s not really what we’ve seen in Star Trek. Instead with cameras, microphones, speakers and screens in one city and a companion setup in another, it would be possible for people in both places to casually chat as if they were on neighboring benches in the same park.

In this way, the blending of the physical and digital provides the residents with a “window” to another city.

I hope this three-part series has given city leaders and others who care about the urban environment as good sense of how to make 21st blended environments, how they might start with available content and then go beyond that to interaction with people walking by.

Of course, even three blog posts are limited, so feel free to contact me @NormanJacknis for more information and questions.

© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

Digital Content For A New Urban Experience

Last week, I posted an overview of a new urban digital experience in the streets of Yonkers, New York.

With the ability to project anything you want on a large wall of a highly-trafficked site or on the ground of the historical center square of a city, how do you kick off something like this?

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In this post, I’ll outline the approach we took for the first phase. (Next week, I’ll describe the more interesting and engaging future.)

The two main goals of this project are:

  • To enhance the street life of the city by offering a new, interesting experience, a new kind of urban design
  • To entertain, engage, educate and reinforce the image of Yonkers as an historical center of innovation and to inspire the creativity of its current residents

With that in mind, we looked for certain kinds of content. Because many residents of the city and an even larger percentage of visitors know little of its history, we wanted to give them some background. Here are some examples:

  • We worked initially with the public library to obtain the front page of the main city newspaper of a hundred years ago. In addition to projecting the front page on the wall of the Riverfront Library building, we created a kind of old time radio news summary of that front-page news, sandwiched between appropriate sounding news bulletin music from years ago. Even when there was daylight and the front-page graphic couldn’t be seen, people could still hear the news headlines. As it turns out, with a Presidential election and the onset of America’s entry into World War I, the days’ news from a hundred years ago was pretty interesting.
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  • We also had a variety of short documentaries about the history of the city that were part of a regular weekly program. This included items related to special events. For example, when the annual Yonkers Marathon was run, you could see video of the previous year’s marathon as well as a Pathé news reel about the marathon in the 1930s.

    There was footage from a drone.

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  • We also included features about the business of the city, called Made in Yonkers, that enables residents to see inside the buildings that are normally closed to the public and to learn about the interesting things going on. Indeed, this kind of venue allows people to see inside any buildings that are closed – museums that are closed at night can still show their contents. It is also possible to show how a part of the city has changed in the last hundred years or even recently or how it will change in the future – just by overlaying a projection of the past or proposed future.
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  • We identified the great musical artists and other performers who had lived in Yonkers – from WC Handy (of early blues/ragtime), to Gene Krupa (jazz drummer) to the singers Ella Fitzgerald and Steven Tyler (local high school grad and originally lead singer of Aerosmith) to the famed comedian Sid Caesar, among others – and put together shows that informed the public of their work and their relationship to the city.
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  • Then we wanted to celebrate the creativity and artistry of current residents. One of the first organizations to cooperate with this project was the Yonkers Philharmonic. On Wednesday nights, you can see them perform if you’re just walking down the street. You can also hear them many mornings, while you wait for your train.
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  • The relatively new Westchester Center for Jazz and Contemporary Music made an album available.
  • Similarly, Friday nights are usually devoted to musical shows from the two local theater companies and performances from the schools. Yonkers also runs its own Idol contest and the most recent edition of that is also shown from time to time.
  • Yonkers, like other cities, runs various festivals during the year – from Friday night Jazz on the waterfront in the summer, to Riverfest that features folk music, to Hispanic and other ethnic group events. The best performances from those are also shown periodically.
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  • As a side note, there is some reassuring about seeing a summer jazz festival
    or a flower garden

    when it’s the middle of February and the streets still have snow. It cheers you up!

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  • Yonkers is also the home of Sarah Lawrence College and an outpost of Purchase College, both of which are especially strong in the arts. The Westchester Community College also has a branch in the city and its Digital Arts program was an early contributor to the content. These local colleges then provided and even created content especially for this project, including animations, documentary videos and new music.

This is only a partial list. If it had to do with Yonkers, if it happened in the city and helps residents appreciate where they live, then it became part of the content library. That library is still growing.

Visual projections on a big concrete wall are pretty straightforward. For the projections on the ground, the same kind of videos won’t quite work all the time and there more emphasis is given to animations, graphics and text.

Obviously, visual projections are limited to nighttime. But the speakers are on all day. So, there is a program for the morning and evening rush hour – usually a sample of what had been played the night before.

And, for a little fun and to liven up the street, during the middle of the day at random times, pedestrians hear little clips of musical sounds or other ambient sounds, like elephants roaring. Huh? I’m walking in Yonkers and I hear an elephant? That will wake up people who have stopped paying attention to their environment.

From some of the examples I’ve given, you also get the sense of how you can transport people mentally. You can show them what’s happening in a different part of the city. You can show them the sunset from yesterday or the flowers of spring when it’s still winter. All of this can uplift the mood of a city.

Clearly the focus of the content I’ve described was on this city – Yonkers – but any city could do the same. People, even city government folks, were surprised at how much content there was about the city. Your city too has much to show. You just need to look and be a bit creative about it.

But even what I’ve described here doesn’t fully take advantage of the opportunity to create new street experiences. More on that next time.

© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

A New Urban Digital Experience In Yonkers, New York

Over the last several years, I’ve written about the value of blending digital and physical spaces for cities so that they can create new exciting, delightful destinations that will inspire and attract people. This was one part of the work I did for the US Conference of Mayors on a strategy to ensure the viability of American cities — especially mid-sized and smaller cities — in a post-industrial, digital age.

Mayor Mike Spano, an innovative public leader and dedicated son of Yonkers, New York, saw one of my presentations at an annual meeting of the mayors and thought it would fit well with the revitalization program he had initiated in his city.

That’s how I got started helping the City bring the “Yonkers Digital Experience” to life.  (The picture below is from the press conference launching the project.)

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There’s a lot to this project so this will be a series of posts — an overview in this post and then later more detail about the content and future direction of the project.

Yonkers is a city of about 200,000 people, on the northern border of New York City along the Hudson River. It was founded in 1646 during the Dutch colonial period, but grew dramatically during the industrialization of the late 19th and early 20th century. For example, it was the birthplace of the Otis Elevator Company. But like many other similar cities in the US and elsewhere, it suffered during the long decline and out-migration of industrial jobs.

With that background, there are two main goals of this project in Yonkers:

  • To enhance the street life of the city by offering a new, interesting experience, a new kind of urban design
  • To entertain, engage, educate and reinforce the image of Yonkers as an historical center of innovation and to inspire the creativity of its current residents

As befits a smaller city — and one that didn’t want to have this supported by commercial advertising which would detract from quality of life — the project was very built on a very economical budget. Instead of huge LED displays, like Times Square, it uses high quality projections and outdoor speakers. When it’s dark, the video is seen and engaged. During the day, there is only audio. The projectors are attached to existing street lights and are relatively unobtrusive.

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While the cost of all this technology has come down dramatically over the last few year, it is still not a trivial technology project to implement. The complete system that takes the contributed digital content and ultimately displays it consists of several independent components of technology that are not always simple to integrate.

For the initial roll-out, two different kinds of sites were selected and handled quite differently.

The first site is the large concrete wall of the big Riverfront Library, which is across the street from the main train station and a big city park (with the Saw Mill River running through it). It is also very near the more upscale apartments that face the Hudson River and the Palisades. This is already an attractive area with lots of pedestrian traffic. It is ideal for the presentation of past and current performances, history, and the like in a fairly conventional way.

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The second location is Getty Square, which was the center of the city a hundred years ago, but is now not quite as important.  In this location, there are two projectors with speakers that are aimed at the ground in the center of the “square”. This is an edgier location and one that is expected to be the center for more non-traditional experiments in art and interaction.

While there have been projections on walls in various cities around the world, especially in Europe, these have usually been limited to the few days of a festival and have mostly been opportunities for graphic artists to use a building wall as a canvass – rather than to create a new permanent urban experience.

From what I’ve seen and read, the closest project to what Yonkers is doing has taken place in Montreal. But in Montreal, the program has been fairly static and solely visual, without sound, the impact on passers-by is limited. Nor does it seem they have any longer-term plans to enable interaction with residents on the street.

So, the Yonkers Digital Experience is an early experiment in urban design, technology and engagement.

The next post will be a review of the kinds of content that is currently part of this project. The final post will highlight where this kind of project can go, as it uses some fun digital technologies.

If you’re interested in the previous blog posts on this general subject, they can be found here:

© 2016 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

Helping A City Envision Its Future

There are some interesting developments happening in Winter Park, Florida.
  Established in the late 1800s as a winter haven for the wealthy of
northern states, it is now a city of about 29,000 people in the Orlando
metroplex.  

Although it has a nice quality of life, relative
affluence, other good aspects, etc., like every city, it faces its
challenges.  What makes it interesting is how the city is responding.

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For
many years, a significant part of the city felt that their library
needed to be replaced and brought into the new century.  This effort
came closer to reality with the creation of a library facility task force more than a year ago and, more recently, with three workshops in which hundreds of community residents participated.  

Needless
to say, this is not how the majority of new library building projects
go about planning.  It is an example of the open and collaborative
spirit of ACi Architects, the
architecture/urban design firm that the city retained, which is leading
this effort.  (This is clearly not the exercise in egotism that too many
architects practice.)

In my role as a member of the Advisory Group to the Aspen Institute’s Dialogue on Public Libraries,
I was invited to talk at one of these workshops about how the changes
in the world and libraries provided the basis for Aspen’s report and how
that report could inform their own plans for a future library.

Since
a good library is very much a part of the fabric of its community, it
is especially interesting that the library planning effort has been
conducted in parallel with a larger “community visioning” project to provide direction for all of the city for the next 50 years.

While
no city will ever achieve 100% agreement on anything, it’s been
fascinating to watch these efforts develop with generally civil
discussion – and visible in real time online to those who couldn’t be
there.  

This picture is from one of the breakout groups during a workshop.

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In
the case of the library workshops, part of the challenge is that the
best site for a new building is in a city park named for Martin Luther
King, Jr. and that there is also a need for what has been a civic center
(community meeting building).  So the design needed is not just for a
library building.

While this complicates things, it also
presents an opportunity to create something new which combines a new
library building and the recreational area around it – an opportunity to
create a kind of knowledge park or knowledge experience.  The library
can offer its services not only inside the building, but on it and
beyond in gazebos around the park – and a new civic forum space.

A
combination library/park/civic space is not common, but not rare
either.  Many large libraries sit in parks, most notably the New York
Public Library in Bryant Park.  But these two public amenities – the
library and the park – are not all that often integrated together.

Recently, WIRED Magazine in its design issue article, “8 Cities That Show You What the Future Will Look Like”,
featured Medellín’s Biblioteca Espana library/park that is “Combining
Libraries and Parks into Safe Spaces for All”, while serving and helping
to upgrade the impoverished neighborhood that surrounds it.

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The
New World Symphony in Miami Beach provides another model of how a park
can be integrated with cultural events inside a building.  With a large
video wall on the outside, it is a natural place for people to sit or
even picnic while listening to great music and seeing great musicians.

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Sometimes the park is jam-packed with listeners.

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Building
a library in a park offers similar possibilities.  Even the always
necessary garage for a library can be turned into a set of display walls
for the projection of knowledge outside of the building – and thus
upgrading, perhaps, hiding its parking function.  For instance, pictures
and text from the city’s African-American history museum could be made
more widely available this way.

Although no two cities are
exactly the same, Winter Park is a good example of an historic, but
relatively small, city that is now striving to re-define itself as part
of a larger metropolitan area in a 21st century digital economy.  For
that reason, I’ll be reporting back on how the residents proceed to set
an example for many other places in the USA and the rest of the world.

© 2015 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/130060753327/helping-a-city-envision-its-future]

Technology Gets More Personal?

This is the last of my end of summer highlights of interesting tech news.  Aside from being interesting, perhaps they also illustrate how technology is getting more personal now.

  • The creative, Munich-based augmented reality company, Metaio, showed off a way it can turn any surface into an augmented reality touchscreen.  The company notes that this is their:

vision of the near future for wearable computing user interfaces. By fusing information from an infrared and standard camera, nearly any surface can be transformed into a touch screen.

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  • Also from Germany, the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits announced a few days ago an app for Google Glass that analyzes what its camera sees and assesses the emotional state of the person in front of the Glass wearer.  It even takes a guess at the person’s age.  It’s an extension of their previous work, offered as SHORE technology.  There’s a video demonstrating this at http://youtu.be/Suc5B79qjfE

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  • As part of its RISE basketball tour in China, Nike unveiled the LED basketball court to train athletes.  This new facility in Shanghai, called the House of Mamba, has motion sensors capturing the actions of the players and LED displays providing direction on the floor.  There’s a picture below, but to see it at work, you should watch the video at http://youtu.be/u2YhDQtncK8

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  • In another example of the blending of the virtual and physical in urban environments, there’s Soofa’s urban hub.  As they describe it:

a solar-powered bench that provides you with free outdoor charging and location-based information like air quality and noise levels by uploading environmental sensor data to soofa.co. The smart urban furniture was developed by Changing Environments, a MIT Media Lab spin-off.

  • Toshiba Corporation announced that it will add a new dimension to its healthcare business by starting production of pesticide-free, long-life vegetables in a closed-type plant factory that operates under almost aseptic conditions … and will start shipping lettuce, baby leaf greens, spinach, mizuna and other vegetables in the second quarter of FY2014.  http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2014_05/pr1501.htm

That’s it for reports from around the globe.  Next week back to analysis and questions about where we’re headed.

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/96538933986/technology-gets-more-personal]

New Soft Cities

Carl Skelton is my colleague and co-founder of the Gotham Innovation Greenhouse and former director of the Experimental Media Center at NYU/Polytechnic Institute.

He has written a book about the Betaville open source project that enables residents of a city to collaborate and participate in urban design and planning.  But it’s more than just about the history and role of the Betaville project.

The book provides context for urban design in an Internet-enabled era.  As the publisher’s (Springer) summary states:

“the reader can gain a deeper understanding of the potential socio-technical forms of the New Soft Cities: blended virtual-physical worlds, whose public works must ultimately serve and succeed as massively collaborative works of art and infrastructure.”

Hence the title of Carl’s book: “Soft City Culture and Technology”, which will be officially published at the end of this month.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/61587029722/new-soft-cities]

US Mayors Pump It Up?

Along with Mayor Bill Finch of Bridgeport, Connecticut, I made a fun presentation at the annual meeting of the US Conference of Mayors.  More about that, but some background first.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been working with the Council on Metro Economies and The New American City of the US Conference of Mayors on a future-oriented, 21st century strategy for economic growth.   

This project recognizes the increasing proportion of Americans who will earn their living by providing digital products and services, on the one hand, and the increasing availability of high quality, casual video communications and collaboration on the other hand.  

Together these lead to some significant changes in the character of the economy and of cities.  (See my presentation at the ICF Institute for more about these changes –  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlNxLmIQ4O8.)

In the early stages, the strategy focused on ideas for mayors as they respond to these changes on behalf of the residents of their cities.  More recently, with USCM staff, we’ve started to create pilot demonstrations of these ideas.

Recognizing that these changes in the economy enable many people to make a living almost anywhere, one part of the strategy is to provide a high quality of life, a “WOW” experience, that’s unique to a city so people come and stay there.  The by-product of this experience is that it can also inspire residents to innovate – a key factor in economic growth.  

With the Internet everywhere across a city, blending the physical and the virtual can create new WOW experiences.  The presentation showed various examples that included displays and projections on walls and other physical structures, on a controlled mist from Long Island Sound, etc.

Bridgeport is a good example of a city that can benefit from this – an older industrial city of 150,000 that is cut by an interstate highway.  It has locations and structures that wouldn’t normally be considered attractive, but offer great potential in a blended virtual/physical world.

Consider this smokestack that is the first sign of Bridgeport that drivers see on Interstate 95.  

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Why not make it a video screen? 

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This blending of the virtual and physical makes it possible to show what’s happening in real-time in another part of town or from another time in the same place.

Consider the multi-modal transit center that people see when they arrive by train, bus, ferry or even a car.  It certainly could be more welcoming.

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Each summer, there is a big music festival in Bridgeport – the Gathering of the Vibes.  My last example showed how this wall could be transformed so it presents one of the star acts, Elvis Costello.  

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The song he’s singing, “Pump It Up”, is also the message to mayors and what they can now do with what used to be dreary places.

I left the mayors with this final thought: this is not primarily about something artistic or a way of getting advertising or even promoting big events.  In a fundamental way, this is how cities need to think about urban design in this century.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/53929055163/us-mayors-pump-it-up]