HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT OF A URBAN SPACE SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF MEDIA?
CityMurmur tries to understand and visualize how media attention reshapes the urban space and the city.

On-line newspapers, information agency, blogs and personal websites, thematic media are monitored to highlight the pattern of perceptions on the urban space. This monitoring activity leads to the creation of an atlas that will produce – in real-time – different maps based on news sources, themes, and time. The atlas allows users to understand the urban space as a function of media attention and biases and social and cultural diversity of the city itself.
The goal of the project is to show how different media differently describe the urban space through the attention that is payed on each street of the city. In the hypothesis of the increasing importance of the on-line presence in contemporary society, a media geography has been generated intersecting the media scape with the geographical reality of the city.

It all began last week, in a city of huge grace.
And wondering how cool would have been
to look around through the eyes of “Media Space”,
we found in a great workshop the solution within.

Murmur, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

After a week of cañas, tapas, fried food and heavy work this is the first result of the Visualizar’08 Workshop.

More specifically this is the wiki page of murmur

Density Design Lab, Knowledgecartography.org and ovrflw, under the nom de plume Writing Acamenic English, are proud to annouce that Murmur is one of the selected project for VISUALIZAR’08: DATABASE CITY.

The traditional monument is understood by its symbolic imagery, by what it represents. It is not understood in time, but in an instant in space; it is seen and understood simultaneously. Even in traditional architectures such as labyrinths and mazes, there is a space-time continuum between experience and knowing; one has a goal to work one’s way in or out.

I have been discussing a lot about quality of life in the last month in very different situations, and it made me thinking this is a key and imperative issue now.
I presented a paper in Changing the change conference in Turin. The conference was about design research for sustainability and was a very outstanding place for exchanging ideas and meet interesting people. I spoke with Chris Ryan

About Complexity Maps
Torino is a city on the move. The tradition forms of representation are obsolete or inadequate to depict the current reality and the dynamics in progress. How can the city be made legible and comprehensible, understood as a complex organism and as a web of physical and social networks? The urban territory is a system whose complexity is growing, in which a multitude of tangible and intangible flows (people, goods, information) stratify and interconnect.

Output
Environment Group

Main Research Conclusion:
The lack of communication between different kinds of actors (people, media, administration) overshadows the environmental and pollution problem of the project area.

History / Future Group

Main Research Conclusion:
In the past social systems like the illegal allotments kept the connections between local actors alive. The place has been disconnected through top down design actions.

Mobility Group

Main Research Conclusion:
The current use of the park has been entirely determined by the a series of external factors that suggest its future dynamics

People Group

Main Research Conclusion:
The locked loops of local policy and money perpetuate a situation of local abandonment which feeds illegal activities and social & political exclusion.

(In)Security Group

Main Research Conclusion:
the perception of safety in the area changed between 2003 and 2008

Complex Faces, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

TWDC – Designing connected places Summer School -
Thank you all, it was amazing.

I was just hanging around in a library close to my office and I bought George Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. While my friend was driving us back home I started to read it out, and that book became our map of a different city, a bright inspiration for the debate about space and urban planning. Try the experiment:

Christian Nold thinks we should pay more attention to how our environment shapes our emotional and physiological states. His work with Bio Mapping—which measures people’s responses to their environment and connects those feelings to their physical location—suggests that a map of emotional landscapes represents a powerful tool for analyzing the relationship between place and broader [...]