Just came back from the ‘Remediating Urban Space: Exploring Design Responses‘ symposium at the Plymouth University in Plymouth, UK. Thanks to the organizing committee: Alessandro Aurigi, Katharine Willis, Mike Phillips, and Gianni Corino! Katharine Willis and Chris Speed have made overviews of #remediatingspace tweets and images made during the event. In the morning I gave a little talk about the ways in which play can aid in strengthening citizen engagement with the urban environment. This is the abstract I submitted, which is the basis for the talk and to-be-written paper: Playing for ownership: digital media and urban design Michiel de […] Read More
We are happy to announce a new event: Social Cities of Tomorrow. Social Cities of Tomorrow is an international conference that takes place on 17 February 2012, plus an intensive three-day pre-conference workshop on 14 ? 16 February, in Amsterdam Netherlands. Social Cities of Tomorrow is organised by The Mobile City, Virtueel Platform and ARCAM. Using digital media technologies for collective urban issues Our everyday lives are increasingly shaped by digital media technologies, from smart cards and intelligent GPS systems to social media and smartphones. How can we use digital media technologies to make our cities more social, rather than […] Read More
I’ll be giving two lunch talks in the next few weeks, the first is public, the second isn’t: November 22 2011 Broodje Kennis at Spui 25 (University of Amsterdam) More information >> December 8 2011 Place-Mat talk at Ymere housing corporation for Placemakers. Read the report of this meeting on the Placemakers website >> In addition, November 23 2011 I’m participating in an e-tourism strategy day organized by LAgroup and Waag Society in Pakhuis De Zwijger. More information >>
As I wrote in an earlier post, I have been developing a new course at Utrecht University, called “The Media City”. It is a course for bachelor 2 students and pre-masters. The program has been set up around a number of guest lecturers, who talk about several ‘media city’ topics from their own expertise. Below some more information about the course (guest speakers + literature list). The course is in Dutch, but all of the literature is in English. Download introductory presentation (PDF, 2.3 MB in Dutch) Download full course instructions (PDF, 220 KB in Dutch) Course schedule: week1, […] Read More
Virtueel Platform commissioned Martijn de Waal and me (The Mobile City) to do a study about the ways media technologies and e-culture can help to design livable and lively cities. In this study we present “ownership” as an alternative design approach. In today’s cities, our everyday lives are increasingly shaped by digital media technologies. How can we engage these technologies to design for cities where citizens feel they belong, where they feel the city belongs to them as well, ands where they have the power to act on communally shared issues? In short: how can digital media aid in strengthening […] Read More
The beginning of this academic year will be quite busy: Sept 14 2011 Amsterdam. Session during PICNIC 2011 “Future Cities: Designing for Ownership” First, at PICNIC this year I’ll present a fresh new study about ‘Ownership in the Hybrid City’ that I’ve done together with Martijn de Waal. The study was commissioned by Virtueel Platform. More about this study (and the international event we are planning in its wake) soon at The Mobile City website. More information >> Sept 20 2011 Istanbul Session during ISEA 2011 “Beyond Locative: Media Arts after the Spatial Turn” After PICNIC I rapidly move on […] Read More
I wrote a review of this recent book on The Mobile City website: In Divining a Digital Future (2011), computer scientist Paul Dourish (Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine) and cultural anthropologist Genevieve Bell (Intel Interaction and Experience Research Lab) again team up in an attempt to marry ethnography with ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) research. The book heavily builds on some of their previous collaborative work. Dourish & Bell propose to develop “a ‘ubiquitous computing of the present’ that takes the messiness of everyday life as a central theme” (4). Their scope embraces the far ends of mythology, […] Read More
Martijn and I have been working on a major redesign of The Mobile City website. Not only does this bring a much tighter interface, it also involves a reorientation of what we want to do with The Mobile City in the future. On the About us page, we more clearly position ourselves as an organization that continues to actively participate in the debates about the new urban condition, and define in what ways we can contribute through our non-profit activities. In addition, we are now more actively bringing our expertise to the market. We added a page called Our services, […] Read More
This is the presentation I gave a few weeks back at the second ‘Serious Games’ expert meeting, organized by the Netherlands Study Centre for Technology Trends (STT) for their Future study Serious Games. The afternoon session took place at Hyves headquarters. You can view back some reports and videos from previous sessions here. Download the presentation >> (PDF 1.4 MB)
This comes as no surprise to me. I’ve been describing this love of high-tech and all things ‘modern’ among Jakartans in my dissertation. Chris McDowall on the “Seeing Data” section of SciBlogs reports: Mapping a Day in the Life of Twitter. He notes that Jakarta glows brightly 24 hours, day and night… (see full animation at SciBlogs) Mark Graham on Floating Sheep notes: As Chris points out, we can see Indonesia (particularly Java) producing an unexpected amount of content. Well, at least unexpected until we realise that Twitter is enormously popular in Indonesia. The country apparently has world’s highest proportion […] Read More
I posted this review on The Mobile City blog yesterday: Aurigi, A., & De Cindio, F. (2008). Augmented urban spaces: articulating the physical and electronic city. Aldershot: Ashgate. (The introduction is a free read from the website). This book from 2008 had been on my desk for quite some time but finally I got around to do a review. It is listed in a recent overview of a decade of writing about digital cities. Three years earlier, one of the editors Alessandro Aurigi wrote the monograph “Making the Digital City: The Early Shaping of Urban Internet Space”. The main question […] Read More
Here are the slides from the presentation I gave at the Wireless Stories Conference organized by Sandberg@Mediafonds, on February 17 2011. Download >> (PDF, 360 KB)
Tuesday November 16 2010 I successfully defended my PhD dissertation “Moving Circles: mobile media and playful identities”. I am now dr. Michiel de Lange :). A big thanks to my paranymphs: Daan de Lange (left) and Martijn de Waal (right). You can download “Moving Circles” here (pdf, 3.6 MB). Versions suitable for e-readers are available as well: * epub (epub file, 1.8 MB) * epub – zipped (zipped epub file, 1.8 MB) * mobi (mobi file, 1.8 MB) * mobi zipped (zipped mobi file, 1.6 MB) This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Netherlands License [note: this […] Read More
Last week on October 28 2010 I gave a talk about ‘The Hybrid City’ for PULS at La Citta Mobile in Eindhoven during the Dutch Design Week. The event was organized by MAD emergent art center. Below my presentation slides (PDF 1,4 MB).
Beste allemaal, Op dinsdag 16 november 2010 om precies 13:00 zal ik mijn proefschrift verdedigen, met de titel “Moving Circles: mobile media and playful identities”. Hierin staat de vraag centraal hoe mobiele mediatechnologieën onze identiteiten op speelse wijze beïnvloeden. Jullie zijn van harte uitgenodigd om de ceremonie bij te wonen. Na afloop is er een receptie. wanneer: dinsdag 16 november 2010 om 13:00 (wees ajb op tijd, de deuren zijn anders gesloten) waar: Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, campus Woudestein, Senaatszaal (gebouw A, verdieping boven de Aula) bereikbaarheid: openbaar vervoer (OV chipkaart nodig in Rotterdam); automobiel/fiets (Google Maps) De verdediging zal hoofdzakelijk […] Read More
== update Oct 12 2010: now truly, really done== At last and alas, the end is getting in sight. I have become progressively more silent on this blog, as I was busy finishing my PhD dissertation, and doing other things, like writing/curating/organizing for The Mobile City. I am just back from Shanghai, China, where Martijn and I have been organizing an event about urban design and the hybrid city (in cooperation with Virtueel Platform). More about this soon on The Mobile City’s weblog. The table of contents of the dissertation is as follows:
‘Designing the Hybrid City’ Dutch Cultural Centre, Shanghai August 16-17 2010 Organized by The Mobile City and Virtueel Platform, in cooperation with Shanghai eArts, V2_, Cybercity Ruhr and Dynamic City Foundation. Extended background information on ‘Designing the Hybrid City’: http://www.themobilecity.nl/adaptation/ Download the Call for Participation ‘Designing the Hybrid City’ (PDF) As part of Adaptation, The Mobile City and Virtueel Platform organize ‘Designing the Hybrid City’. This event takes place in Shanghai on August 16-17 and focuses on the role of digital media and technologies in urban design Mobile and wireless media, as well as technologies that can sense and react […] Read More
Saturday 20th March 2010 from 16:00 ? 18:00 I will moderate the session “Food and Global Mobility” at the ElectroSmog Festival for sustainable immobility. The venue is De Balie, Amsterdam (Google Maps). Entry is free. This is the program: What does food mean for us today? There is a growing understanding that food is not only a fuel to keep our bodies working, a source of pleasure, and for some also a source of income. It is also an important link between us and our environments, natural and social, local and global. More and more people are trying to rethink […] Read More
[this post also appears at The Mobile City weblog] How can architects relate to digital media? The Mobile City keynote at the ‘Day of the Young Architect’: outcomes and further thoughts written by Michiel de Lange & Martijn de Waal Introducing the main questions What do developments in digital media have to do with architecture? And how should architects and urbanists relate to developments in new media? The Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) and Royal Institute of Dutch Architects (BNA) invited The Mobile City to address that question for the yearly ‘Day of the Young Architect’, on November 7th 2009 in […] Read More
[this post also appears on The Mobile City weblog] On December 14th 2009 De Balie – an Amsterdam-based center for culture and politics – organized an evening about old and new cartographies. Participants were Ferjan Ormeling (Emeritus Professor Cartography, Faculty of Geographical Sciences, Utrecht University), Henk van Houtum (Associate Professor of Geopolitics and Political Geography, Head of the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research), Maarten Keulemans (science journalist), Jelle Reumer (director Natural Museum Rotterdam, Special Professor at Utrecht University), Lucas Keijning (NEMO science center), and me. The evening was lead by Volkskrant journalist Martijn van Calmthout. The evening was set up […] Read More