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Data cycle ()
Data cycle: Behind MIT’s SENSEable Cities
Lab
By Ian Daly (/search/author/Ian+Daly)
23 May 11
Five real-world arcologies
under construction
(/news/archive/201106/21/paolo-soleriarcologies)
21 June 2011
This article was taken from the April 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the
first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your
Leave aon loads of additional content by subscribing online
hands
comment
(https://www.circules.com/subscribe/wired-uk/60606).
(#CommentList)
A cold November afternoon on the MIT
(http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/04/start/best-friendbots)
(/news/archive/2011-06/21/paolo-soleri-arcologies)
Italian architect Paolo Soleri, who came up with
campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the sky is the colour of concrete.
the concept of the arcology, has just hit his 92nd
Assaf Biderman, an academic at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
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with a background in physics and human-computer interaction, is amused by
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how wrong the predictions of the techno-futurists -- that cities are outmoded
magazine for only £2
hangovers of the industrial age -- have turned out to be. Biderman, sporting a
an issue
(http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;227508490;34725390;j)
blue blazer and three-day stubble, is standing next to a "smart" trash
birthday, so we thought a suitable celebration
would be to compile a list of five real-world
arcologies currently under construction »
(/news/archive/2011-06/21/paolo-soleriarcologies)
receptacle at the entrance to the Stratton Student Center, talking about the
future of cities in the digital age.
Related features
Finnish designer unveils
forkless bike
(/news/archive/200909/24/forkless-bikedesign)
"It's almost like the digital layer didn't destroy urban density, but is in fact
recombining with it in a different way," he says, between drags on a Camel
cigarette. "And this is really what we're exploring: how is it recombining? How
can it actually become infrastructure? How can it drive experience?"
Digital Cities: 'Sense-able' Biderman, 33, is the associate director of MIT's SENSEable City Lab
urban design
(http://senseable.mit.edu/) (SCL) -- a multidisciplinary research centre whose
(/magazine/archive/2009/11/features/digitalofficial brief is "to investigate and anticipate how digital technologies are
cities-sense-able-urbandesign)
Water-filtering push bikes
in high demand for
Bangladesh
(/news/archive/201102/18/bike-purifies-waterjapan-bangladesh)
changing the way people live, and their implications at the urban scale".
Biderman and the SCL's director, Carlo Ratti (who has a background in
engineering, architecture and computer science), founded the laboratory seven
years ago with $10,000 (£6,250) in seed money from MIT's school of
architecture (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-02/28/serragliamute-spaces) and planning. "I was stupid I didn't ask for more," Ratti says.
The city they had to
move
Since then, it's grown into an international collaboration of around 30
(/magazine/archive/2009/06/features/theresearchers with backgrounds ranging from urban planning and social science
city-they-had-to-move)
to robotics and engineering. Although it's not easy to characterise the research
because of its breadth (it includes smartphone-enabled bicycle
(http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-02/18/bike-horse) wheels, flying
Book publishing finally has its 'Radiohead moment'
-- with Harry Potter (/news/archive/201106/23/pottermore-radiohead-publishing)
Ink-redible dress made out of vibrating pen nibs
(/news/archive/2011-06/22/nib-dress-gallery)
Video: Nasa prototype hovers autonomously, in
infrared (/news/archive/2011-06/22/controlledhover-test-flight)
Get the cheapest UK iPad: A buyer's guide
(/news/archive/2010-05/19/get-the-cheapest-ukipad-a-buyers-guide)
2,000-year-old Greek Antikythera mechanism
rebuilt in Lego (/news/archive/2010-12/10/greekcomputer-in-lego)
What Pottermore means for Warner, Bloomsbury
and other stakeholders (/news/archive/201106/23/what-pottermore-means-for)
Modders make epic Zelda tribute in Minecraft's
Zelda Adventure (/news/archive/2011-06/23/zeldaadventure-in-minecraft)
More News » ()
LEDs and navigation systems that make use of social networking), there is
growing excitement about SCL among corporate and civic institutions. This
year's funding has surpassed $3 million -- none of it from MIT. Several major
corporations, including GE, Audi and SNCF, are now bankrolling its projects,
along with major cities such as Copenhagen, Bolzano and Singapore.
"It's no surprise Ratti has so many high-level backers," says Simon Giles, global
lead for smart-technology strategy at Accenture, who is working with the MIT
team to develop infrastructure in cities. "Urban planning isn't just about cities.
The Steve Jobs MBA Unit
113: The big reveal is the
best advertising
(/magazine/archive/2011/07/stevejobs-mba/unit-113)
22 June 2011
It's about the convergence of the physical and the virtual, and his ability to be
conversant in that is what sets Ratti apart. It's the raison d'être of the lab."
In 2008, for the first time ever, over half the world's population lived in cities.
By 2050, that proportion is expected to grow to 70 per cent. The shift has
coincided with a new kind of conversation -- a real-time dialogue between
people and their environment.
"If you think about what's happening today versus a decade-and-a-half ago,
computers have become extremely small," Biderman says. "A lot of them are in
computerised networks -- mobile phones, transportation, energy -- and get a
(/magazine/archive/2011/07/steve-jobs-mba/unit113)
Steve Jobs has long known that the best
lot of information from them about what's going on. Human activity. Where are
advertising is the kind that money can’t buy -- that
the buses? Where are the masses of people? So our environment has been
is, news stories. From the very beginning of his
talking back to us. And this is really a new condition that wasn't possible a
career, Jobs has persuaded the news media to
decade-and-a-half ago."
cover his product launches as news events »
our pockets. So you can put sensors within the environment and tap in to
(/magazine/archive/2011/07/steve-jobs-mba/unitLeaning against the back wall of SCL's fourth-floor headquarters in MIT's iconic
113)
"Great Dome" building is a bicycle that could change the world.
At first glance, it resembles a familiar sleek, white Italian street bike with a
mysterious red disc suspended in the spokes of its rear wheel. But that disc is
loaded with tech. The Copenhagen Wheel
(http://senseable.mit.edu/copenhagenwheel/), as it's called, is the product of
three years' work by nearly two-dozen researchers -- and it can turn virtually
any bicycle into something like a hybrid car
(http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-09/10/hybrid-cars-value). Hidden
under the red lacquered metal is an electric motor, a computer, GPS, Bluetooth
and a pair of batteries that store the kinetic energy from your braking. Then,
when you need a boost, the motor can release some of that energy to push
you up a hill. You can use any Android-enabled phone to tell the wheel how
The Steve Jobs MBA Unit 114: Stay hungry, stay
foolish (/magazine/archive/2011/07/steve-jobsmba/unit-114)
The Steve Jobs MBA Unit 108: Dazzle Your
Audience (/magazine/archive/2011/07/steve-jobsmba/unit-108)
The Steve Jobs MBA Unit 109: Steve Jobs: In his
own words (/magazine/archive/2011/07/steve-jobsmba/unit-109)
The Steve Jobs MBA Unit 110: Challenge the
expectations of others
(/magazine/archive/2011/07/steve-jobs-mba/unit110)
much resistance you want. As the wheel integrates seamlessly with your phone
and wireless internet, it also displays GPS
Magazine » (/magazine)
(http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/03/start/memo-to-futureself) info, real-time traffic conditions, "green kilometres" logged and pollution
data -- all to help you plan a route. Should anyone be foolish enough to ride off
with your toy, the wheel will track its location in real-time and dial up the
Wired Twitter ()
resistance to maximum, which -- thanks, thief! -- conveniently charges up your
batteries. Riders can connect with a network of other cyclists in their city and,
through sharing their data, contribute to a larger pool of actionable
information.
@mike_searle
(http://twitter.com/mike_searle) well spotted,
we'll fix that. Ta.
about 20 minutes ago
(http://twitter.com/WiredUK/statuses/84214667018371070)
"It's biking 2.0," says Ratti, 40, the programme's director. He and his team,
including project leader Christine Outram, unveiled the wheel in December
2009 at the COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen
(where 36 per cent of residents ride daily). It was so well received that 12
prototypes are now being tested, and the hub -- which can fit inside the wheel
of most bicycles -- should hit the market this summer for less than £400. Its
sleek -- and not inconspicuous -- appearance was no accident. Ratti's team
secured funding and design guidance from Ducati for the prototypes. Jennifer
Dunnam, a graduate student in MIT's architecture programme, joined the
project 18 months ago and remembers the wheel's humble beginnings -- a
crude disc milled from a piece of steel.
"When trying to create the shape of it, the biggest design element we always
talked about was making it disappear -- making it small and thin, seamlessly
integrated into the spokes," she explains, standing next to the prototype,
wearing a pair of black-framed glasses and with her long blonde hair pulled
back. "Then, at the very last moment, Carlo said: 'Make it Ferrari
(http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-03/24/transformers-3-gets-newferrari-autobot) red.'"
The word "visionary" may be overused, but it is a fair description of Carlo Ratti.
A Fulbright scholar with degrees in engineering and computer science and a
PhD from Cambridge in architecture, Ratti came to MIT to do research at its
renowned Media Lab, a place that's been investigating communication between
humans and machines for the past 25 years. His work at SCL is an obvious
extension of his own obsessions; his Turin-based architecture practice bears
Artist builds interactive canvas from 4,750
illuminated switches: http://bit.ly/kwPgjK
(http://bit.ly/kwPgjK) by @olivia_solon
(http://twitter.com/olivia_solon)
about 25 minutes ago
(http://twitter.com/WiredUK/statuses/84213350644465660)
Tesla to end Roadster production
http://bit.ly/mgtIwn (http://bit.ly/mgtIwn) by
@duncangeere
(http://twitter.com/duncangeere)
about 26 minutes ago
(http://twitter.com/WiredUK/statuses/84213289214677000)
Become a fan
Follow Wired
on Facebook
on Twitter
(http://facebook.com/wireduk)
(http://twitter.com/wireduk)
the marks of a man who sees little separation between the virtual and the
tangible. Its vision, according to the website, is a "seamless interface between
bits and atoms". Past projects have included homes in the Himalayas, a bridge
in Venice and a proposed renovation of the railway
(http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-05/25/russian-pensioner-buildsunderground-railway-below-his-house) station in Florence.
But Ratti's office at MIT suggests a tenant who doesn't spend much time
behind his desk. It's little more than a nook that he shares with Biderman off
SCL's main meeting room. There is a small shelf lined with books about cities,
computer code and design, and the walls are plastered in big white sheets
scrawled with brainstorming notes. "Frame data in such a way that empowers
people," one of them reads. "When does this become social manipulation?"
"Some people, like Media Lab at MIT and elsewhere, started looking at this
interaction between humans and machines," Ratti explains, adjusting his ovalrimmed glasses as the afternoon sun sets through the windowpanes. "But the
interesting thing is that now the machine, the computer, is becoming the city.
The city has become the interface -- to retrieve information, to meet other
people, to do all the things happening now with this mixing of bits and atoms.
So it's this new exciting equation, putting together people, space and
technology."
Having such a wealth of real-time information available, Ratti says, has huge
implications for urban planning and the way people think about cities. In the
past, gathering information on people was costly, slow and often inaccurate.
Vast resources had to be deployed -- and still do, in most cases -- to research
anything from population data to TV viewing. Now, thanks to wireless
technology and portable computing, all that data can be detected, analysed and
fed back into the system almost simultaneously. And that means planners no
longer have to design a city on assumptions: from now on, they'll actually know
how it functions.
C A L E N D A R
( / E V E N T S )
June Events
(/events/2011/06)
Click a day below to see forthcoming events in the
Wired calendar, or submit your own.
30
31
1
(/events/2011/05/31) (/events/2011/06/01)
6
7
8
(/events/2011/06/06) (/events/2011/06/07) (/events/2011/06/08)
13
14
15
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(/events/2011/06/20) (/events/2011/06/21) (/events/2011/06/22)
27
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(/events/2011/06/27) (/events/2011/06/28) (/events/2011/06/29)
Last year, Ratti and his team launched a project that significantly scaled up
their research. LIVE Singapore! (http://senseable.mit.edu/livesingapore/) is an
open platform for developers to combine real-time and static information about
the city from data providers, feed that information to citizens who want it and
then, in turn, feed information about those citizens back into the system. The
result is a picture of what's happening at that moment. LIVE Singapore! won't
just tell you where the nearest shop is, it will tell you where the nearest shop is
that stocks the product you're looking for. Rather than just telling you where
the highest-rated bars are, it can send you to the bars that are actually busiest.
"You've heard of mashups for music?" says Giusy Di Lorenzo, one of the
project's team members. "We want to build a mashup for a city -- allow people
to build their own mashup however they want, to mix and match different
parameters of data."
Ratti has a team of ten people operating in Singapore, and the system will be
up and running later this year. For it to work, of course, the system will rely on
equal parts city and citizen -- both elements must constantly exchange
information about each other to get the most up-to-date and relevant
information possible. A similar symbiosis underlies Aida, a navigation system
that SCL is designing with funding from Audi. Still in its conceptual phases, Aida
uses personal habits and preferences to give a vehicle's navigation system a
better idea of what information to share with its driver by tapping into a
community of other drivers. Think of it as your social network colliding with
your car's navigation system.
"Every time I go to a new town, my navigation system displays a thousand
points of interest and it drives me crazy," says Di Lorenzo. "Or it tells me the
so-called 'hot spots' and you show up and no one's there." Aida, on the other
hand, would know that your idea of a good night out, say, does not entail a
smooth jazz trio -- those venues won't even show up on your screen. The
system would become familiar with your routines and suggest alternative
routes if there's traffic, or tell you which pubs are dead so you don't waste your
time.
Although it might seem intrusive to have a car -- or a city -- so intimately
acquainted with your personality, Di Lorenzo says, if anything, her team
underestimated the importance of that information exchange. LIVE Singapore!
began in 2007 as a project called WikiCity. Its charter was similar, but with one
crucial difference: it fed the user real-time information about his or her city,
but didn't feed any information about the user back into the system. Because of
that, Di Lorenzo says, the project was more or less considered a failure.
"What was missing was that we didn't keep people in the loop," she says.
"People received data, but they didn't share it or help build anything. If I allow
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you to be a real component of your city -- to really receive what's going on -you're much more involved. And you'll share it with others. Facebook taught us
a great lesson in that."
One evening in November, Biderman is finishing a talk on "The SENSEable City
-- Information and Mobility Networks Recombine" in the Stratton Student
Center. After he shows off an impressive array of infographics on how Rome's
public-transport system and mobile-phone-location information could be
combined to forge a future in which "buses chase you", an audience member
from MIT's Industrial Liaison programme politely asks him if the public might
react adversely to all this data being shared about their whereabouts. The
data, Biderman explains, is aggregated, so no one's identity is compromised -and the benefits are far too great anyway.
"It seems like there's a new value proposition that's not even understood yet or
discussed with the public," Biderman says. "Today we share our data, we get
free search, we get free newspapers -- OK, that's very nice. But do people
know that you can make transportation move faster? That you can clean the
air? That you can distribute energy in a smarter way throughout the city using
anonymised information? There are many other propositions, applications or
solutions that could come out of data that are very powerful and that people
aren't aware of yet."
Examples of this are IBM's Smarter Cities initiative
(http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/smarter_cities/overview/index.html)
and Cisco Systems' Smart+Connected Communities
(http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/smart_connected_communities.html).
Like SENSEable City before them, both focus on the intimate connection
between the flow of information, citizens and the urban landscape.
Eric Baczuk met Carlo Ratti in a cloud. It was December 2009 at the Venice
Biennale and Baczuk, an architecture student in Harvard's Graduate School of
Design, was working with German environmental-engineering firm Transsolar
and Japan-based Tetsuo Kondo architects. Their goal: to create an enormous
man-made cloud and suspend it inside a massive 12th-century brick building
that's part of the Arsenale, Venice's former shipyard. Ratti convinced Baczuk to
come and work with him at SCL and now the 29-year-old Canadian is working
on a GE-sponsored project to bring clean water to Rio de Janeiro in time for
the 2016 Olympics. Attaching sensors to in-home water filters would allow the
city to collect data not just from neighbourhoods, but from individual
households, creating a web of info that pinpoints where the water's purity has
been compromised. It's a level of resolution that's never been possible before.
"If you go into a house in Rio, almost everybody has a water filter because they
don't trust the supply," Baczuk says. "Our thinking is to introduce sensing
technology and communication to create a distribution map of the city and give
people awareness of what's going on with their water. The whole city can see
it. If you can see your region is problematic, it motivates political action, too."
Some SCL projects have nothing to do with cities at all. Last year, in the wake
of the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/201102/08/bp-oil-spill-solution-oobleck), the lab unveiled SeaSwarm, a project that
used floating robots capable of soaking up enormous amounts of oil thanks to a
treadmill of MIT-developed paper-towel-like nanofabric that would glide along
the surface of the water. A prototype has already been tested in the Charles
River, and SCL estimates that 5,000 of them would have a spill the size of last
summer's disaster -- an estimated five million barrels -- cleaned up in under a
month. Considering it took more than 800 manned skimmer boats to collect a
paltry three per cent of the surface oil from Deepwater Horizon, that's an
encouraging prospect. To get that level of efficiency, MIT researchers had to
use "swarm theory" -- patterns of movement borrowed from ants and bees.
Ratti knows it's not always easy to see the common thread that stitches
together SCL's many disparate projects, which is why he says he'll be splitting
it into related departments later this year, based on types of research.
Visionary as its work may be, SCL has been accused of aiming too high and its
mission appearing to be more of an odyssey of wondrous possibility than a
blueprint for actual results.
"The nature of their work has been a little diffuse," says Adam Greenfield,
author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. "They've got
a lot of irons in the fire and it's not always clear how they plug in together. The
level of intellectual rigour is high, but it lacks what I would regard as an
appropriately critical stance." Full disclosure: Greenfield recently launched a
company called Urbanscale, whose charter is remarkably similar to SCL's.
According to its website, Urbanscale is "a practice committed to applying the
toolkit and mindset of interaction design to the specific problems of cities".
But what SCL also lacks, Greenfield says, is a level of real-world awareness -an affliction shared with similar initiatives in the "smart city" vein. Last
December, for example, IBM announced a new partnership with the city of Rio
de Janeiro to build a Single City Operations Centre that would require the
installation of monitoring equipment to keep track of conditions throughout the
city in real-time -- right down to the off-the-grid residents of the favelas.
"These are people who've resisted being on the map for a century -- and
they've done if for a reason," says Greenfield. "Not necessarily good reasons,
but practical ones. The ignorance -- verging on contentful ignorance -- [of] the
complexity and nuance of all these things is pretty typical of bad technological
solutions. It's something we see time and time again when somebody wants to
impose a seemingly sensible technical schematic on an unruly human reality
underneath."
But not all SCL's projects have such far-reaching sociological implications. In
fact, the least obvious entry in SENSEable's portfolio just might be its most
spectacular.
Erich Mueller, a pony-tailed aeronautics graduate student, sits in a sunlit
student lounge a couple floors down from SCL's headquarters next to a cleancut and bespectacled graphic design student named Adam Pruden. In front of
them on a blond-wood table are two flying LEDs -- one attached to a bare
microchip, the other obscured in the hemisphere of a ping-pong ball. Both are
surrounded by four minuscule, black plastic rotors.
Mueller and Pruden are showing off the only existing prototypes for a concept
called FlyFire that, in theory, will use thousands of these "self-organising
micro-helicopters" to assemble into arrays and display glimmering, threedimensional forms that can shift and rearrange themselves on command.
Pruden, clad in a dark jacket, explains.
"There are a lot of uses for emotional reactions," he says, "and large-form
displays, large messages. If you want to announce a warning to an entire city,
you have it in the sky where everyone can see it." But Mueller isn't bothered by
issues of practicality. Taking up one of the robots in his hands, he stares at it
the way a new father might look upon his son, and says: "It's like the space
programme, right? I mean, it's hard to justify it from the perspective of helping
society, because it doesn't really do that much. But it inspires people. If you
have to ask, 'What's the point?' then you just don't get life, I guess."
Ian Daly wrote about data bunkers in 11.10
1 (/magazine/archive/2011/04/features/data-cycle?page=1)
2 (/magazine/archive/2011/04/features/data-cycle?page=2)
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Written by Ian Daly
Matthew Mahon
MIT (/tags/MIT), Bikes
4 (/magazine/archive/2011/04/features/data-cycle?page=4)
(/search/author/Ian+Daly)
(/tags/Bikes), Bicycles
Edited by Liat Clark
(/tags/Bicycles), Assaf
5 (/magazine/archive/2011/04/features/data-cycle?page=5)
Biderman
(/tags/Assaf+Biderman),
View all (/magazine/archive/2011/04/features/data-cycle?
SENSEable City Lab
page=all)
(/tags/SENSEable+City+Lab),
Urban planning
(/tags/Urban+planning),
The Copenhagen
Wheel
(/tags/The+Copenhagen+Wheel)
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