2nd Generation GPS

Hi guys,

I've done a bit of research on 2nd generation GPS for cars.

1st generation: just maps, GPS can give you directions and tell where you are.

2nd generation: live traffic information is available in a subscription service to modify your route
http://www.cnet.com.au/gps-traffic-messaging-faq-339293321.htm

3rd generation (I just made this up): Traffic/roads will adjust to the requirements of road users

This might be a useful way for us to explain our service.

John

Links

Hey Gang,

Check out some more links I found that we might be able to use as case studies:

http://parkingday.org/

http://www.homezones.org.uk/index.cfm

Horrible web-design http://www.walkablestreets.com/ yuck!

More on NYC http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/about/stratplan.shtml

http://www.livingstreets.org.uk/

http://carfree.com/

There is plenty going on out there in the world.

Have a good weekend, enjoy the sunshine!

John

Future screen technology

Ideation:
the youtube about future screen technology....

Complete Streets

Below is an email from a leading traffic engineer here in Melbourne:


Hi John, Arup, including myself, are doing this work all around the globe.

Re-allocating streetspace and other urban infrastructures to better provide for other users is the new "big thing" in transportation planning. have you heard of the HighLine in new york? you should check it out - really amazing reuse of old freight rail into a public park, and it's been hugely successful by new yorkers. And the time square closure to cars as you pointed out has also been a very successful pilot by nyc dept of transport. In melbourne, there are lots of examples too not least of all is City of Melb's planned upgrade to Swanston St, which gets rid of cars etc.

http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/ParkingTransportandRoads/Roads/SwanstonStreet/Pages/SwanstonStreet.aspx

St Kilda Road and, more recently, Albert St has been reconfigured to provide greater service to bikes. http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/copenhagen-bike-lanes-cause-chaos-in-melbourne-20100607-xqsl.html

There was a lot of hot air when it started up but it seems to work OK now. Other material easily comes to hand http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/ParksandActivities/WalkingCyclingandSkating/Documents/bike_separated_lanes_factsheet.pdf

Tram superstops are an example of reallocation of roadspace away from cars. There are plenty of them in the CBD. There is the redesign of Harbour Esplanade down at Docklands http://www.vicurban.com/cs/Satellite?c=VPage&cid=1195447200144&pagename=Docklands%2FLayout

An interesting case study is the area of Elizabeth St outside the market. It won an urban design award when it was installed in the 80s, but over a very short time the award-winning bluestone flagstones were replaced by patches of bitumen following maintenance activity on the services. It's now just an ordinary piece of road. Bourke St mall was an early piece of work done by the City of melbourne at closing down cars to public transport and pedestrian space and you can see how successful that is today. It was done in the 1980s from memory. This has been through a number of redesigns over the years. My recommendation for you would be to talk to someone at the City of Melbourne. Maybe Rob Moore. +61 3 9658 9616.

I think that you might also be talking about the complete streets agenda so i'd recommend checking out this link: http://www.completestreets.org/. Hope this is some help to you. Good luck with your study - it's a really interesting piece of work that i look at everyday! Please feel free to contact me whenever you need if you have more questions etc - more than happy to help.

CheersOlivia

Happenings

Hi guys,

Thinking about a service and user group I remembered different events like the Sydney Harbour Bridge Picnic:

http://www.breakfastonthebridge.com/event

These sort of 'happenings' might be a way forward for our project.

John

Thanks!

Thanks John. I'll check it when I finish to read hundreds of pages of Melbourne Statistics
:)and do some design graphs.

See you tomorrow.

The Adaptive City

Hi guys,

Please read the article below, it is a great piece of writing on the future of cities with the advance of technology. The author is an Australian, Dan Hill who works for Arup and has plenty of other interesting information and writing on the web.

I think this essay will form a core part of our idea and support for the service we design towards the end of semester.

http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2008/09/the-adaptive-ci.html

See you tomorrow.

John

Case study

Reclaim the street

- Share of community ownership of publish space

- “Resistance movement” opposed to the dominance of corporate force in globalization --> People > Car

--> “Invasion” of major road + highway etc. --> stage a party (non-violent action)

Streets for People (NY) 2004

- A “How to” primer for People à “Traffic calming" Slow + reduce traffic speed, e.g.: stepping stones --> slow down traffic

--> Share equally by user

--> Increase walker and cyclist

--> Quieter, safer, friendlier neighborhood streets

Critical mass (AU+ around the world)

- Celebration of vibrant urban life + reclaiming public space

- Bike, cycling event typically held on the last Friday of every month

- No leadership or membership

- Drawing attention to how unfriendly the city was to cyclists

(something more to read about http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-11-15-bikes-new-york_x.htm)

Block Party (NY)

- Neighborhoods --> No car

- Change transportation policy --> increase quality of life

- Rebalance public space

- Engage people in working on traffic and livability issues on their street

Street alive (website)

- Promote traffic-free street




I found more articles but i do not have time to read through all of them, organise and analysis them yet.

More link here:


http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/AboutCouncil/PlansandPublications/Pages/PlacesforPeople2004.aspx


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_transportation_system


http://www.scipub.org/fulltext/jcs/jcs47517-524.pdf

Research Ideas

Hi guys,

I have found quite a bit of information relating to 'intelligent systems' especially relating to traffic flows and also in relation to how mobile computing technologies are changing the flows of information and the systems available. This should help us with the 'enabling' of our idea.

The best source I have found is "Societies and Cities in the Age of Instant Access", a great collection of essays relating to our ideas.

Chloe I think you are right, we need some theoretical or secondary research in this project, but the majority will be primary research, dealing with users and their needs.

Carolina we will update you on the latest tomorrow. Please bring all your statistics with you we need to start pulling out some of the most relevant to get our project under way.

See you then!

"Eagle eye" and " Echelon conspiracy"

Hi guys,

I'm just reminded of 2 films when thinking of the intelligent system. Did you guys watch "Eagle eye" and " Echelon conspiracy"? They are quite similarly about "super computer" that change traffic light, calculating possibility rate, etc....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Eye
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_Conspiracy

I think there are similar ideas of the "intelligent" machine or system with our project, although they end up to urges not using supercomputer and some privacy issue is cited.......

well, just think of these movie suddenly (although not that related to our research)

Hi guys

I have been looking for information in regard to streets regulation to see if is possible or allow to close streets any day without any particular event such as Melbourne coup or national day, like queen birthday or any other. Or just because the system recognize that its going to be a beautiful day or just because there’s no footy game and people want to go walk in one particular street.

The other think is we can cover in the research areas such as a street vendors, I have found an article about vendors in New York, if this happens people can just go and have a small places and sell.

The other thing could be security cameras, increase the number of police officers, even details like street photographers.

See u tonight

Re: research ideas

I m not sure about if we can find literature reviews or not on this topic. But i think that we may just need one or two literature review research as a background supportive information, right?
Because it is a quite "new" and intelligent system design project idea, i think it is a good idea to investigate about user behavior, experience and response on different urban design toward different road system. So focus group, culture probe, user testing and interview would produce useful information to our topic.
I think case study on the interactive technique and similar project in different countries would not be bad for us to understand how to "enable" our idea. And it should help us to back up our system on the later design stage.
I believe practical research is better than therical one in this project, um...right?

Other resources...

Hey guys,

In my opinion we should cover some points in our research, they are:

Methods:

Literature review
Melbourne statistics
Focus group (fins specific information - people thought)
Interviews or Survey (Opinion of new system, suggestions, agreements and disagreements)


For research:

-Demographic characteristics
- Consumer behaviour (depends on the area)
- Melbourne Urban planning
- Density areas (pedestrian paths, use of public space - commercial and residential)
- Media communication (interactive and phisical)
- Population trends
- Melbourne 2030


Some links:

http://udf.org.au/udf-quarterly/udfq-72-december-2005/article/melbourne-s-urban-transformation-into-a-place-for-people/

http://www.yarracity.vic.gov.au/Parking-roads-and-transport/

http://www.yarracity.vic.gov.au/Parking-roads-and-transport/Traffic/

http://udf.org.au/udf-quarterly/udfq-72-december-2005/article/melbourne-cbd-and-pedestrian-traffic-study/

http://www.dse.vic.gov.au/melbourne2030online/content/implementation_plans/03a_about.html

http://www.dse.vic.gov.au/DSE/nrenpl.nsf/LinkView/1352EB2F109044AFCA2575120016BE8B25FA24FDEB7476BACA25761E001FDF4D

See you in class!

Share

Hi guys,I saw some "road design"?! for slowing down cars/ remind them to drive slowly. One of them is using the stone that i rmb that John hv mentioned before?! (not the whole road). So i just took them as some example/ reference......^^

Chloe

Research Ideas

Hi guys,

I think we have an awesome topic and hopefully one we can work on together through to the end. With the blend of skills in our team I think we will arrive at a much better outcome if we all add our own skills into the project.

Please think about research methods and research areas we can use to help us build up information to support our project.

Some methodologies I can think of that might be helpful are:

• Literature review
• Statistical Analysis
• Cultural probe (how do people organise their travel and/or social life)
• Focus group
• User Testing

Some research areas I have thought of are:

• Intelligent systems, algorithms that can manage complex interactions of variables
• Democratisation of space, urban futures to 2020, what ideas exist that empower people to control the functioning of their cities or towns (e.g. flash mobs, http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/guerilla-games-thousands-to-hit-ikea-for-game-of-hide-and-seek-20100819-12ljq.html)
• The assessment of Sustainability innovations (to ensure our ideas can be justified)
• City movement monitoring and analysis, can people be tracked to capture their movements and preferences? (Arup are already doing this)
• Traffic management systems and their integration into Public transport and other systems

Please write back with your own ideas, there are many angles we can take in this project, working out the best ones will be difficult, so the more we have the better off we will be.

John

Local SD Article

Hi guys,

Here is a really interesting article on the topic of system design.

http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/the_strategic_arc_of_interaction_design_moving_towards_holistic_system_design_by_steve_baty__17064.asp

John

Topic Time!

Hi guys,

Hi Felipe, I hope you are feeling better!

To get us all on the same page I have summarised our topics below, have a think about each and bring your ideas Thursday night.

I think by the end of class we want to have a topic chosen and some research directions.

1) Service Service (complaintbook)

• A service that allows people to leave feedback relating to customer service they have experienced
• It provides information to companies who want to improve their customer service
• It provides information to consumers as to which companies to choose
• Similar to Choice http://www.choice.com.au/

2) Affordable Housing for Remote Communities

• A system that utilises advances in construction technology to provide affordable housing to remote communities
• Possibly using free labour, i.e. volunteers
• The idea of "Pop-up Factories" to make houses in the city where the labour and resources are and deliver them to remote communities
• Scalable to any region, whether remote or just across town

3) Living Streets

• A system that builds intelligence into city streets, manipulating traffic and accessibility to optimise the use of space
• An intelligent system that can analyse a number of variables such as weather, events, seasons, sales, etc to change the status of streets
• This allows for pedestrianised streets with increased public transport when the number of visitors is high, or allows cars when the number of pedestrians is low.
• Linked to a database that informs visitors, businesses, transport, cleaners, security etc.
• Have a look at this presentation, I haven't watched it all yet but it sounds interesting. http://www.ixda.org/resources/dan-hill-new-soft-city

Time to have a think about a direction and decide on a topic that will allow us to get the most out of this subject.

John

HDG609-610 Design As Service

Hi there,

This blog is a record of the activities of Carolina, Felipe, Chloe and John as they chart a course through Design As Service at Swinburne University, Semester 2, 2010.

This blog is for collecting and sharing useful information as our project progresses.

Keep checking back for more research and updates on how our project is progressing!

John