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	<pubDate>Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:32:03 +0000</pubDate>
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		<title>Prototype Scenario Animatic</title>
		<link>http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?p=219</link>
		<comments>http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?p=219#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:32:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Michael</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Mobility Systems]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?p=219</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Animatic/Mashup of the &#8216;Prototype Scenario&#8216; developed earlier. The file is available on Vimeo and can be freely downloaded. We encourage you to download and create your own version of a Mobility 2040 scenario and upload the results to the Vimeo group &#8216;Mobility Lab 2040&#8216;

]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Animatic/Mashup of the &#8216;<a href="http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?p=189">Prototype Scenario</a>&#8216; developed earlier. The file is available on <a href="http://vimeo.com/5586876">Vimeo</a> and can be freely downloaded. We encourage you to download and create your own version of a Mobility 2040 scenario and upload the results to the Vimeo group &#8216;<a href="http://www.vimeo.com/groups/19657">Mobility Lab 2040</a>&#8216;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://vimeo.com/5586876"><img class="size-full wp-image-234 aligncenter" src="http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/vimeo.jpg" alt="Ella Scenario" width="504" height="290" /></a></p>
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			<wfw:commentRss>http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?feed=rss2&amp;p=219</wfw:commentRss>
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		<title>Mobility systems and mobility culture</title>
		<link>http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?p=221</link>
		<comments>http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?p=221#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2009 07:41:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Michael</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Mobility Systems]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?p=221</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[

This paper is a preliminary scan of research material for the State of Design Festival Mobility Systems Laboratory for 20 July 2009. Presented is a set of ideas pertinent to a discussion about the opportunities for the future of transport infrastructure in inner Melbourne. It a prompt and not exhaustive. Historical data is included to [...]]]></description>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><img class="size-large wp-image-226 alignleft" src="http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/wordle-1023x735.jpg" alt="wordle" width="737" height="530" />This paper is a preliminary scan of research material for the State of Design Festival Mobility Systems<span> </span>Laboratory for 20 July 2009. Presented is a set of ideas pertinent to a discussion about the opportunities for the future of transport infrastructure in inner Melbourne. It a prompt and not exhaustive. Historical data is included to isolate the assumptions, conventions<span> </span>and decisions underpinning much of today’s thinking. Unpacking these is as important as identifying new technological opportunities. Our own unexamined assumptions often silently inhibit innovative thinking. The material is crudely sorted into three topic areas: 01: Mobility culture, 02: the city and urban space, 03: some emerging strategies and opportunities. I apologise for the dot point format and lack of reference details. Especially if you find you are reading one of your own papers.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<h1><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-weight: normal;">T[Æ] = R[KM]/S[KM/H] </span></span></h1>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">There is a very significant relationship between mobility and the structure of our cities. So intimate is that relationship in modern societies, it is possible to directly correlate the size and growth of a city to the speed of readily accessible transport across the city. The glue or catalyst for that relationship is time. Just as in the Middle Ages city limits were determined sonically, by the need for all citizens to hear the centrally located church bells, so in our time a cities size becomes unattractive to peripheral growth when the average upper limit for journey time from the centre exceeds one hour. <strong>This predicates a strong relationship between transit speed and city radius</strong>. Travel speed predicts the radius or footprint of a city. The upper acceptable limit for nominal journey time is one hour. The travel systems operating in a city become one of the most critical determinates for predicting and planning city size. The radius R must be traversed in less than one hour so this<span> </span>= the average speed of travel possible Km/hour [nominal]. So in our cities car speed and road infrastructure determine your house or garden size and land price.</span></p>
<p class="MsoBodyText"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><span>01.<span> </span></span></span><span lang="EN-GB">Mobility culture. <strong>Speed</strong>, autonomy and comfort</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Personal and public transport infrastructure needs to present as intelligently and transparently interconnected, easy to use, safe, predictable, comfortable and clean. This applies to all transport spaces and hubs as well as the connective machinery. The car both symbolises and delivers powerful lifestyle options; individual freedom of movement and expression, comfort and customisable privacy in public places and an immediate responsiveness to personal impulses and changes of plan. Consider motile space and its relationship to domestic space. The car is better understood as a heavily serviced mobile salon or lounge-room than as a utility for mobility. Replacement technologies and platforms need to deliver a similar quality of experience and freedom.<span> In <em>Your Private Sky</em> Richard Buckminster Fuller describes how the interaction of social convention and technological innovation can generate the possibility of change, driven by changed social processes. He recounts the condition of old mid-western American farm settlements. They consisted of many buildings, each with a specific function: barn, stables, corncribs, wet fermenting ensilage, woodshed, cold cellar etc. Each required elaborate and time-consuming maintenance. With the advent of efficient farm machinery in the early Twentieth Century, the American farmer “finally had time enough before twilight to sit and look at the scenery and he built porches around his house. As he began to have more and more time, he began to put screens on the porches. With ever more time, he began to put glass windows on the porches. Sitting on his porches, he watched other people go by. Then came the automobile, which in effect put wheels under his glassed-in front porch, so instead of waiting to see people go by he drove down the street to see the people. In a very real sense , the automobile was part of the house, broken of, like hydra cells going off on a life of their own. The young people who used to court in the parlour, then on the glassed-in front porch, now began to do their courting in the automobile, or the porch on wheels. Today the young people do their courting in their parlour on wheels, driving it to the drive-in theatre. Because we are conditioned to think of the house as static, we fail to realise that the automobile is as much a part of the house as is the addition of the woodshed.” 36. By this description the architecture is defined by the users’ patterns of behaviour, their rituals and social and technical processes. The architectural framing can not be circumscribed by the activities of a particular discipline or the limits of a particular technological platform. The patterns of use can jump unpredictably from one technology platform or territory of a particular design discipline to any other. In engaging with designing for change this lack of boundary for defining how an activity might evolve is a critical consideration.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">The internal combustion engine car was an adventure machine [electric cars/ABC Radio National Rear Vision]. The 1880s was the decade of light, the 1890s was the electrification of streetcars and people expected that the early 20C would be an electric century replete with electric cars, the ultimate electric appliance. The petrol engine was supported by a national distribution infrastructure of thousands of gasoline stations that the Rockefeller interests had put in place. Most of this was for gasoline stoves, which was a common technology in Rural America. The expansive infrastructure supported the adventure machine promise. <strong>The roaming range was guaranteed by the existing infrastructure, creating a great advantage</strong>. Part of the original masculine thrill was the noise and filth. Electricity was principally urban. The nail in the coffin was the American transport infrastructure generated for World War 1. <strong>The liberty trucks</strong>, sent to Europe in their thousands created a population of cheap vehicles after. Electricity didn’t have much to contribute. Ironically early electric vehicles like the 1900s Edison trucks in Chicago lasted forever because they had one moving part, but this sort of evidence did not shift peoples thinking. By the 1970s as interest in electric vehicles resurfaced, petrol based combustion technology was very developed, effective and embedded. The 1990 State of California Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate, in response to childhood asthma, created an economic imperative to actually bring electric cars to market. When California dropped a number of its pollution laws after being sued by the car manufacturers, these manufacturers began to recall their electric cars. For the car companies the big truck guys have always made the money, a legacy of the liberty trucks. Simple and big trucks make the money and they have the boardroom power, not the small car guys.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><strong><span lang="EN-GB">Numbers from the SAE World Congress</span></strong><span lang="EN-GB">: Only 22% of the chemical energy in fuel is converted to power the vehicle. After aerodynamic loses and tyre resistance only 5% is left as evident in forward motion. Weight saving in vehicles costs about $10/kilogram to manufacture in. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><strong><span lang="EN-GB">The jaywalker</span></strong><span lang="EN-GB">. The age of individualism, celebrated in the nineteenth century, enamoured society to the idea that people got on better, in the densely populated city, if there was distance between them, a sort of collective isolation where the separated, freely-moving crowd was also detached from the space in which they moved. The arrival of the automobile in the early twentieth century brought this planning logic to a head. The street was no longer like the civic park, a place for all to occupy and mingle together in. It was becoming a space of isolated transit, speed and physical danger. In the early 1900s in Chicago the auto dealers and auto clubs began campaigning for greater priority for the car in public streets by redefining walking in the street as an inappropriate thing to do and an inappropriate use of the street.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><em><span lang="EN-GB">“And one way they did this was to invent a new term of ridicule, and direct that against pedestrians walking in streets. They used a mid-Western American term ‘Jay’ which was an insult; it meant that you were uneducated and rural, and they connected it with ‘walker’ and invented the term ‘Jay walker’ and it was used as a term of ridicule against pedestrians.”</span></em><span lang="EN-GB"> Peter Norton. Assistant Professor, Department of Science, Technology and Society. School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Virginia 07.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><strong><span lang="EN-GB">Figures from the 2008 Gamut Symposium</span></strong><span lang="EN-GB">. In Australia there are two privately owned cars for every three people. The average person travels 9000 kms and uses 1000 litres of petrol. Most of this is work related<strong>. The thrill of driving</strong> as involving mastery of speed and acceleration, and its associated controlled risks, and acceleration as producing physiological changes in the human body. They further argued that cars provide their owners with <strong>a powerful means of self expression</strong>. Also affective motives; emotions evoked by driving a car, drew people to car use. Driving can affect peoples mood and people may anticipate these feelings when making travel choices. Getting there is half the fun. These are non-instrumental motives. Instrumental motives include convenience, speed, flexibility and safety. A possible reason for car travel growth is that people can participate in extra activities, since they have higher speeds available. Car journeys allow non radial travel, less oriented to the centre. Higher speeds equal more travel. Car travel has perceived advantages in greater security, privacy, all weather protection, ease of transporting young children and goods along with air conditioning and stereo sound. The car equals freedom of movement and expression. It is an enlightenment instrument.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">In <em>Flesh and Stone</em> Richard Sennett observes that the unique twentieth century experience of the <strong>high speed passive body</strong>, in control of a rapidly moving vehicle, makes a new geography possible. We now measure space in terms of how easy it is to drive through it. Speed requires networked space and standardised and predictable space. The speeding body is disconnected from the physical environment, aware only of the regularised road. The voyager becomes a voyeur. Geography becomes fragmented and discontinuous.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">• <strong>Trams Los Angeles. ABC Radio National</strong>. In the 1920s Los Angeles had the biggest street rail system in the world, built by the electric and utility companies. The system lost out to the car due to it not servicing the land between the tracks [built as part of a real estate empire. People then used cars for leisure time trips also and this took away the off peak railway use and <strong>they became too expensive to operate</strong>. They then got into buses which they sold as an elegant ‘de luxe’ motor coach alternative. Rail lines and street cars and public transit creates civic life in a city that is very important. This is very different to the culture the automobile generates.</span></p>
<p class="MsoBodyText"><span lang="EN-GB">• <strong>Trams Australia. ABC Radio National</strong>. Australia’s first trams were the Sydney horse drawn trams in 1861.This experiment failed but in the 1870s they returned as steam trams to serve the 1879 Exhibition as temporary infrastructure at very short notice. It <strong>proved to be very successful</strong> and the line was extended. Melbourne had horse drawn trams in the 1870s moving to cable in 1906 and then electric in 1920. Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong’s tramway systems were begun as privately owned enterprises<span> </span>and were eventually run by the State Electricity Commission. The Sydney and Newcastle trams ran with multiple cars, up to 4 in one unit. Sydney’s trams were crucial for moving huge crowds quickly for major events like the Randwick Racecourse and Sydney Cricket Ground and had a greater capacity than is available today from the bus and road networks. <strong>It shaped Sydney and the pattern of land use</strong>. <strong>The Australian terrace house network was developed around the tramway network</strong>. [Paul Mees, RMIT] We see here the act of architectural forms driven by the impact of transport technology. When the tram network went we got a very different pattern of development in the outer suburbs [Michelle Zeibots Institute of Sustainable Futures UTS.] Sydney’s trams ran fast, on reserve tracks and serviced the eastern leisure centres, beaches and the zoo. In Sydney the peak usage was 400-million per year in 1945. City rail today moves 200-million a year. [Robert Lee- Associate Professor, School of Humanities and Languages, University of Western Sydney.] Motor traffic took off in 1950. More influential people began to own cars and the NRMA and the Motorists Association were hostile to the ‘Tram centric’ road rules to delayed cars while tram passengers disembarked. This pressure saw the tram system shut down in NSW in 1961. The car industry and allied services stimulated economic growth and was seen as a necessary engine of modernisation and recovery after the war. There were massive protests in Sydney over the removal of the tram lines. Given the choice [one we don’t have now] people went for a better public transport system rather than having only the car. It was also cheaper to replace the tram system with buses rather than upgrade it. Interestingly some of Sydney’s most popular tramlines were in quite wealthy areas like Vaucluse and Mosman. Rich people did travel by tram. To make public transport work, the key thing is how you put the package together. The whole thing must function as an organic system as it does in Zurich. You can set off from any part of Zurich at any time and get anywhere in the metropolis without having to wait. In Sydney we saw the <strong>destruction of Parramatta Road into a ‘dead traffic sewer’ from the vibrant major tram corridor.</strong> It is a key example of what the car based traffic system has done. In Melbourne strip shopping centres like Chapel Street have been kept alive by trams and easy access to good public transport. [Paul Mees, Lecturer in Transport and land Use. RMIT]. A lot of urban planning coherence has been lost along with the trams. The trams in Sydney were an easy target for denigration because they were readily derided as old technology. It strikes me that the public transport lobby failed to counter its old world image with a seductive, technological, economically vigorous narrative like Harley Earl did with General Motors in the 1930s when the car faced a crisis in public confidence!</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">In the minds of planners for much of the later half of the twentieth century <strong>public transport equalled welfare</strong>. Instead how do we promote the significant value of connectedness, relational knowledge and sense of place, people develop by walking or biking. Traditionally car use has been equated to economic growth. Any lack of connection to place through the use of the car has been seen as irrelevant. Public transport spaces, motile and static, need to compete with the car in terms of appeal and convenience and they must not feel like drains.</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><strong><span lang="EN-GB">The Brazilian city of Curitiba </span></strong><span lang="EN-GB">is a model of public transport design.<strong> It</strong> has developed a cost efficient yet effective public transport rapid transit infrastructure. <strong>The genius of Curitiba was to make a bus network run with the efficiency and predictability of a lightrail system, at a fraction of the cost</strong>. The system allows for easy and inexpensive growth. <strong>The bus network has stimulated growth corridors as light rail traditionally does</strong>. Buses are cheap. Curitiba shows that transit and strong land use controls can impact development but the land use controls are vital and the capacity of the transit system to deliver. The Curitiba plan works by limiting city spread and increasing density along the transit lines. Mobility and land use can not be disassociated from each other for successful planning. The buses have been given exclusive lanes to create the reliability of light rail systems. Bus shelters are designed to achieve rapid passenger transfer and provide shelter from weather. The transit network is broken into zones and a network of interconnected bus types and terminals. Curitita planning encourages local pedestrian traffic, less driving and more shopping. 75% of weekday commutes are by public transport in Curitiba. The impact on fuel consumption across the city is 30% below that of comparable cities. Travelling by public transport in Curtitba is a lot cheaper than going by car. Curitiba’s transit infrastructure is tied to a wider raft of planning policies: a pedestrian network, bicycle paths, parks, historical preservation and flood control. City hall has built satellite administration offices at come bus terminals to facilitate contact with the people. Curitiba interlinks mobility strategies with urban planning strategies and has developed a bus network modelled on the operational advantages of lightrail at a cost the city can afford.</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">In <em>New Movement in Cities</em> Brian Richards raises the idea of the <strong>layered city section</strong>, whereby different transport types, with their respective speeds, safety and footprints, are vertically separated . How do we frame the relationship between different types of journey and mobility? He suggests district wide elements like travellators, like the old district heating idea. In the 1960s they were suggesting multi-level sections that today we might see as not legible enough to users. Richards is very interested in the layered ‘Departo’ model in Japan, where civic activity hubs and department stores are built up on top of railway and subway stations. They act as linear generator spines of new connected activity. Does this model still hold value for design thinking?</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><strong><span lang="EN-GB">The modern flâneur and Networked Place</span></strong><span lang="EN-GB">. The ‘always-on’ Internet changes our concept of place; places are all linked and this sensibility transforms our sense of proximity and distance. The networking of space and the spatiality of the network creates new opportunities but also shifts the way we see and use real space. Simultaneous distributed places are created by face book, iPhone music downloads, internet browsing for recreation, job searching, on-line studying, on-line writing, tele-working, and can all be shared at Starbucks. This is a different proposition to the experience of remote destinations as they figure in the work and relationships at Lloyds insurance, say, originally Lloyds coffee house, in that we are communicating to far flung souls, not through the agency of proximate people but, remote networks. As physical places or destinations the 18<sup>th</sup> century café and the salon are significant. They represented a public sphere that was not so much a physical place but a discursive site for rational and critical debate and was extended by the new newspapers, penny novels, pamphlets and magazines. Arcades, boulevards and other public spaces shaped the bourgeois city to be away from home yet to be at home. <strong>The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur</strong>. Wall and café tables are his desks, news-stands his libraries and café terraces are his balconies from which he looks down on on his household after his work is done. The flâneur is the original tele-worker. The flâneuse is safest in the cathedrals of consumption, the department stores, but these are still spaces of social intercourse. Yet in today’s social space, people in close proximity do not interact. They are in another place. In the 19<sup>th</sup> century the pedestrian mobility of the flâneur was augmented by many transport machines – trains, streetcars, buses, moving walkways, escalators and elevators. However today we have come to believe that the only way one could navigate the overwhelming condition of the metropolis is by disconnecting. Jane Jacobs linked the decline of the city with the collapse of the public sphere arguing that civitas depends on an architectural infrastructure that encourages frequent, random face-to-face interactions within an urban community, which the suburban house does not provide. Marc Augé identifies non-places, as in-between spaces, sites of transit. These are airports, airplanes, freeways, parking garages, data, goods and capital, ATMs, shopping malls, supermarkets, spaces of solitary individuality. They privilege the fleeting, ephemeral and contingent. They are not place; locations in which people with distinct identities form human relationships that accrete, creating the sediment of human history, filled with individual identities, language, references and un-formulated rules. Our Starbucks is not a place where random individuals chat with one another about the issues of the day.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><strong><span lang="EN-GB">Mobile or Motile place</span></strong><span lang="EN-GB"> and the rise of the <strong>telecocoon</strong>. In <em>The Social Impact of the Telephone</em> Ithiel de Sola Pool explains how the telephone made the modern city and highrise office buildings possible. The telephone is a technology that encourages sociability and maintains intimacy at a distance allowing relationships to be constructed and maintained over increasing distances. Television offered people a compensatory sense of belonging in the isolated expanding suburbs. The city itself is a communication device and up until recently the two primary ways of browsing it have been on foot or by car. The car is also a communication device, a viewing machine, its windscreen, a membrane that frames the view. An expanding interstate highway network evolved, itself a prototype for the <em>information super highway</em>, the internet. Jean Baudrillard talks of the ‘private telematics’ of driving, the vehicle a capsule, the surrounding landscape unfolding like a televised screen. Automobiles are transitional mobile devices, equipped with car radios, CB radios, mobile phone and GPS and an OnStar accident cellular transmitter. Additional telematics make the car hypermobile This combination has provided individuals with a unique level of peripatetic autonomy, often without the modernist schedule, and creating new modes of social behaviour. <strong>The telecocoon maintains intimacy at distance, facilitating private encounters in public spaces</strong>, relying not on an architectural plan or spatial design but networking technology to create private space. For Japanese youth Keitai are ‘territory machines’ redefining the notion of public space, transforming a subway train seat, a sidewalk, a street corner into the users ‘own room and personal paradise’. The widespread introduction of cameras now allows an ongoing stream of viewpoint-specific photos shared with intimates, making them devices for the virtual flâneur. Victor Hugo’s essay in his novel <em>Notre Dame de Paris</em> in 1831 sees the printed book replacing architecture as the most expedient platform for public pronouncements, communication and discourse; public texts. So now the network might replace the building as dwelling place, virtual space might replace real space. William Mitchell suggested a city of bits, electronically mediated space. We are in fact inhabiting 2 spaces; real and virtual simultaneously. The 8 million on line players of World of Warcraft have established the first virtual settlement. Saskia Sassen talks about the global city, the key site for the new global economy, a function of a network of cities, acting as nodes in a planetary economic and communication system. As the telecocoon functions on an individual level, the global city’s connections create local disconnections. Both tiers act as barriers like Manuel Castell’s Indian reservation observation. What is external to the network does not exist, in the way that inhabitants living on a reservation can be invisible to the surrounding society. Castells suggests there is a bipolar opposition between the Net and the self as individuals try to reaffirm their identities in a rapidly changing world. This picks up on Jeremy Rifkin’s <em>Age of Access</em> idea of role playing and access to appropriate networks being now more important than material acquisition in establishing identity etc. Sites like My Space are actual social spaces in the minds and lives of the users. Physical location and space is now subsumed into the bigger matrix of network elements, one component of the matrix. Consider how geographic information systems, applications like Google maps, and the 1000s of mash-ups, have adjusted the realisation and experience of public space with its layers of display data. As with locative media, data tags get spatially located to particular sites. Data is spatialised. Locations become data ports including dynamic social data. Spaces and objects will be imbued or annotated with addressable folksonometric memory tags, RFIDs. These could contain the memories of every artefact to which they are attached from the date and location of their manufacture etc. Next, things can become active, even sentient observers and information platforms, able to communicate with each other and us. We are in a time of global connections and local disconnections. Place, rather than being a source of stability becomes a territory of deep and contested transformation.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">As our concept of place expands to accommodate the digital network connection between humans, each other and things so place becomes mobile, virtual, contingent and ubiquitous. Consider Paul Valery’s 1928 essay ‘The conquest of Ubiquity’ addressing the changing value of an art work once it has been from its place of origin and delivered elsewhere and everywhere. Is a network a place. Is a place a network?</span></p>
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			<wfw:commentRss>http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?feed=rss2&amp;p=221</wfw:commentRss>
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		<title>Prototype Scenario</title>
		<link>http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?p=189</link>
		<comments>http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?p=189#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Jul 2009 07:54:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Michael</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Mobility Systems]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?p=189</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[As the third stage in our research and preparation for the Mobility Laboratory Workshop we have compressed a number of the emerging propositions and opportunities into a schematic narrative or scenario. The intention is to use this as a prototype or &#8216;first strike&#8217; at ways of approaching the research material to begin to tease out [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>As the third stage in our research and preparation for the <strong>Mobility Laboratory Workshop</strong> we have compressed a number of the emerging propositions and opportunities into a schematic narrative or scenario. The intention is to use this as a prototype or &#8216;first strike&#8217; at ways of approaching the research material to begin to tease out a set of briefs or scripts for discussion and the eventual framing of a set of design studios:</p>
<p><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-191" src="http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/01.jpg" alt="Ella" width="640" height="320" /></p>
<p><em><strong>Ella is running late</strong></em>. Ella is always running late. At 24 she feels like she is already running out of time. She has a major presentation to give at the office in the city this morning and she has a heavy pile of documents to carry. Normally, for commuting, she would use her active transport, her fold-up bikepod, because it is a great way to enjoy a spring morning, cycling through the leafy bike ways but today she will take social transport. Her mobile gives her an up-to-date real-time feed of all the transport options in the area, combined into a journey planner application. She SMS’s a feeder bus passing close to her home which drops her at her local transport hub. The network-wide, one-unit fare is deducted automatically via her mobile phone when she gets on the bus. The bustling hub is a great drop off point for kiss-and-riders and it has a massive, secure bike-park. Wifi enabled cafes, shops and a surrounding park, along with a government access counter, means you can pay your bills, drop off the dry cleaning and pick up dinner, all on your way through. Big ‘system-and-data-map’ graphics, some looking like digital graffiti, some like 3D shapes, provide constantly updated real-time transport information, and change the appearance of the building. Locally generated digital content creates a unique local character, making the hub a gateway to a neighbourhood identity. All neighbourhood transport networks use the hub and connection points are clearly identified. Social transport runs around the clock and wait times rarely exceed 5 minutes. As the light rail approaches she opts for the Café Carriage. As a moving, distributed location, the social transport network has been fully serviced-up like Melbourne’s lanes. The social transport network has also become a favourite site for new pop-up retail events, making the daily journey very diverting if that’s what you need. Commuters are often asked to participate in and score new experiences and this has also become a big part of the evening’s television. The yoga carriage is the latest addition, very popular with commuters from the outer suburbs.</p>
<p>Today, latte in hand and scanning the morning newspapers, Ella bumps into Paul. She hasn’t seen him for at least 2 months and its great to catch up on industry gossip. Paul has been away in the country for the weekend. His pride and joy is a silver, 1971 Ford GT-HO Phase 3. He won second prize in the Rolex Castlemaine Concours d’Elegance The concours, one of many across Australia, draws an annual crowd bigger than the grand final. Like the evolution of horse racing at the turn of the 20th Century, cars are now appropriately part of the art, culture and sport scenes, objects of fantasy and investment, not the backbone of the transport network. There is still a lot of passive transport around but it’s small, specialised; shopping buggies for mums with young kids, wheelchair-access-mobility pods for the elderly and speed-restricted local electric, modular transport trucks that make the last stage of deliveries and pick-ups from the rail networks. Getting fast trucks off the road was critical to bringing down the weight and size of all other road vehicles.</p>
<p>While Ella’s journey on the social transport network, across 3 vehicle types, take 20 minutes, she has used the time very effectively answering work e-mails, making appointments and preparing briefing notes for her colleagues. Like the Micronesian navigators, for whom the wide ocean was still a safe and predictable home, so for Ella, the social transport network is a controllable, comfortable and porous extension of home. Sometimes it’s like your den, sometimes like a back yard BBQ.</p>
<p>Arriving in town she meets up with 2 colleagues, Lisa and Peter, at the Finders Street Hub for a pre-work catch-up. Using a ‘ubiquitous city’ UbiGo kiosk they quickly checked out the upcoming Historical Survey of HipHop show at the NGV international and booked tickets to the 3D immersive New York Streets in 1973 movie. Using the 80 inch RFID enabled touch screen kiosk made a group booking and agreeing on where they should sit in the cinema a lot less painful than trying to do it on your iPhone. Lisa couldn’t resist the opportunity to upload a very beautiful graphic pattern she had been working on into the social space digital graffiti program. The hub’s digital lightwalls now played the pattern across the 20 metre high atrium space. Lisa was thrilled to see how the pattern looked at full scale. She was designing it for a digital set for a theatre production she was working on. Apart from the convenience and appealing bustle of these city spaces, they provided unequalled public access to the most sophisticated digital tools and communication. Like a digital version of the bounty and richness of the architecture and spectacles on show in ancient cities.</p>
<p>Ella heads off up Flinders Street to her office. Pedestrians criss-cross the boulevard between the trams, rickshaw cabs, single-person gyro-pods, bike pods, bicycles, active pods and compact speed restricted-speed electric delivery vehicles. Private passive transport no-longer has access to a lot of the CBD. Covered pedestrian travelators or moving pavements break up the longer stretches of the pavements on the main streets, if you are carrying stuff or don’t feel like walking. Carparking stations, connected to the inner ring of social transport hubs, accommodate city bound traffic. In fact the distance you once had to walk from your car park to your destination in the city is now only slightly greater except that now the streets have so much more amenity. Some streets have ULTra light electric rail cars running up the centre that operate only along the city grid. Extensive translucent wind and rain canopies create shielded environments and many have power generating wind turbines for the street lighting and digital information architecture. Some even have heaters. The city feels like a very lively, at times chaotic but inviting sprawling urban lounge room.</p>
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		<title>Not so new movement in cities</title>
		<link>http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?p=90</link>
		<comments>http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?p=90#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:18:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Michael</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Mobility Systems]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?p=90</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Below are two tables extracted from Brian Richards&#8216; book  New Movement in Cities published in 1966 and Future Transport in Cities published in 2001. Each table shows the available transportation systems of the time.
The diagrams&#8230; show plans and sections of transport systems drawn at two different scales (the plans are at one scale and the [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Below are two tables extracted from <a href="http://www.team10online.org/team10/members/richards.htm">Brian Richards</a>&#8216; book  <a href="http://www.amazon.com/New-Movement-Cities-Brian-Richards/dp/0289369789"><em>New Movement in Cities</em></a> published in 1966<em> </em>and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Future-Transport-Cities-Brian-Richards/dp/0415261422/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1246324588&amp;sr=1-1"><em>Future Transport in Cities</em></a> published in 2001. Each table shows the available transportation systems of the time.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>The diagrams&#8230; show plans and sections of transport systems drawn at two different scales </em>(the plans are at one scale and the sections at another). <em>The comparison of running costs shown in the right hand column is the actual running cost and does not take into account construction or staff costs</em>. (Unfortunately, this is only included in the 1966 table)</p>
<p>It is extraordinary to note that there are no technological transportation breakthroughs during this period - the tables are essentially the same. In 1966 Richards did not have access to the significant potential of digital information and communication technology in delivering new solutions. The tables make apparent the idea that a &#8216;technological&#8217; solution is not the answer to the future of transport.</p>
<p>Please click on the images to view the complete tables</p>
<p><a href="http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/1966.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-106" src="http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/1966.jpg" alt="1966" width="757" height="1276" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/2001.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-105" src="http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/2001.jpg" alt="2001" width="815" height="1559" /></a></p>
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		<title>T(Æ) = R(km)/S(km/h)</title>
		<link>http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?p=50</link>
		<comments>http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?p=50#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:58:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Michael</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Mobility Systems]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?p=50</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[T(Æ) = R(km)/S(km/h) 
The relationship between transit speed and city radius.
There is a very significant relationship between mobility and the structure of our cities. So intimate is that relationship in modern societies, it is possible to directly correlate the size and growth of a city to the speed of readily accessible transport across the city. [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<h1><em><span style="font-size: 18pt; line-height: 200%; font-family: &quot;Cambria Math&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; color: #7f7f7f;" lang="EN-GB">T</span></em><em><sub><span style="font-size: 18pt; line-height: 200%; font-family: &quot;Cambria Math&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; color: #7f7f7f; font-weight: normal;" lang="EN-GB">(Æ)</span></sub></em><em><span style="font-size: 18pt; line-height: 200%; font-family: &quot;Cambria Math&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; color: #7f7f7f;" lang="EN-GB"> = R</span></em><em><sub><span style="font-size: 18pt; line-height: 200%; font-family: &quot;Cambria Math&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; color: #7f7f7f; font-weight: normal;" lang="EN-GB">(km)/</span></sub></em><em><span style="font-size: 18pt; line-height: 200%; font-family: &quot;Cambria Math&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; color: #7f7f7f;" lang="EN-GB">S</span></em><em><sub><span style="font-size: 18pt; line-height: 200%; font-family: &quot;Cambria Math&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; color: #7f7f7f; font-weight: normal;" lang="EN-GB">(km/h)</span></sub></em><em><span style="font-size: 18pt; line-height: 200%; font-family: &quot;Cambria Math&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; color: #7f7f7f; font-weight: normal;" lang="EN-GB"> </span></em></h1>
<p><strong>The relationship between transit speed and city radius.</strong></p>
<p>There is a very significant relationship between mobility and the structure of our cities. So intimate is that relationship in modern societies, it is possible to directly correlate the size and growth of a city to the speed of readily accessible transport across the city. The glue or catalyst for this relationship is time. Just as in the Middle Ages city limits were determined sonically, by the need for all citizens to hear the centrally located church bells, so in our time a city&#8217;s size becomes unattractive to peripheral growth when the average upper limit for journey time from the centre exceeds one hour.</p>
<p>In this manner therefore, travel speed predicts the radius or footprint of today&#8217;s city. With an acceptable upper limit for the nominal journey time from centre to periphery being one hour, the travel systems operating in a city become one of the most critical determinants for predicting and planning for city size. As the radius R must be traversed in less than one hour, so this equals the average speed of travel possible Km/hour [nominal].</p>
<p>Image copyright Syd Mead Inc. <a href="http://www.sydmead.com" target="_blank">www.sydmead.com</a></p>
<p><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-71" src="http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/mead-0392011.jpg" alt="mead-0392011" width="608" height="456" /></p>
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		<title>Laboratory Archive</title>
		<link>http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?p=1</link>
		<comments>http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?p=1#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 14 May 2009 00:09:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://blog.designlaboratory.com.au/?p=1</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Welcome to the Design Laboratory Archive.
Here you will find articles, links, films, podcasts and information connected to each Laboratory System.
Select the tabs on the top menu to move between each System.
Enjoy!
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			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Welcome to the Design Laboratory Archive.</p>
<p>Here you will find articles, links, films, podcasts and information connected to each Laboratory System.</p>
<p>Select the tabs on the top menu to move between each System.</p>
<p>Enjoy!</p>
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