Throughout the Bigger Picture lecture series, we were emerged in a lot of contemporary questions about the world around us: Big Datas, Happiness, Sexism, the 21st Century City, Mixing Areas to Create New Expertise, and Neuroscience and the Senses. As a group, we looked at the WorldWideWeb and its infrastructure -historical, political, technological, social and its design; but I was personally more interested by the big datas and the new city. The amount of different ideas, backgrounds, lifestyles, etc, has never been so high and so condensed. The internet, the web and the computer itself, that I’ve been using since I’m four have been very useful tools to learn, experiment and question. I’ve quickly averted my eye from TV in exchange for that screen that would make me feel like I was special -it was doing what I wanted it to do! About the city, it has always been very magical to me, it was those lights, those shops, those faces. The streets were where we hung out after

© Couchpotato clipart,Webweaver.

© WorldWideWeb,Freepik.

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school and before our parents got home, it was where we learned the most about social life and social fun, and it was where I smiled the most. After Jamie Bartlett and Anna Minton’s lectures, I saw those informations as tools, it was facts that were waiting to be used for a greater purpose. Jamie Bartlett showed how the Internet created a safe place for people to express themselves: you’d always find someone that would share your opinions no matter how weird they were. Anna Minton made me more question the future of the Privatised City, and what that would do to that street fun I’ve cherished all my life. In my opinion, Web and Streets have that common aspect of being a playground for human interactions, meeting new people and forming new ideas. And we do need new ideas for the new problems arising with the 21st Century -global warming, health, education.. Which brought me to wonder, is there a way to connect those two platforms together? There is no reason for those beautiful platforms to be separated, and it brought me to a more global question which will lead this essay: ‘How to enhance human collaboration?’ First, I will analyse what is to be used from big datas and from the city to help us design for a better world, and then reflect on the Information Revolution and its affects on the common citizen, and how to use design as a tool to create a more collaboration-friendly city.

© Jamie Bartlett, Telegraph.

© Anna Minton,Anna Minton.

Datas and cities have the advantage to include lots of people in its ranks, and this number is growing everyday. As a designer, it is our duty to take it as a chance to learn from those people and expressions.

The growing number of datas, as Anthony M. Townsend observed in his book ‘Smart Cities’ (2010), is directly linked to the new connectivity at a personal scale. Since the first computer, the number of personal technology have multiplied at a high speed: laptops, Walkmans, iPods, cellphones, smartphones. It was then, only natural for humans, to create personal editable websites, which ended with the birth of personal Social Media such as Twitter, the blogs, and so much more. Self expression has never seemed to be so well accepted in society.But, in addition of the new connectivity, a new generosity also rose. As Clay Shirky in his book ‘Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age’(2010) pointed out: websites such

© Anthony M. Townsend,Amazon.

© Smart Cities (2013),Amazon.

© Clay Shirky,Wikipedia.

© Cognitive Surplus (2010),Amazon.

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as PatientLikeMe shared the patient’s experience of drugs and treatments, creating a real online support for anyone to use. This support can also be seen in grass-roots movements such as the Lewisham Hospital movement after the amount of supporters were too high for the council to refuse them. Now, we can show, that clearly, there is a real online community waiting to connect with each other, that are willing to help for better lives.This new connectivity and collaboration give us a good idea on the public’s opinions and desires. It’s a new very valuable tool to the designer’s kit, especially for the research’s purposes.

As William Shakespeare said “What is the city but the people?”, it is important to focus on the cities’ population lifestyle choices, and how one human connects to another.We can observe the growing of street art movement over the past decades, which has been use as a tool for diverse purpose such as political expression, social expression but also simply as a tool to communicate. It is a very raw art form, but a creative one nonetheless. Also the skateboarding community could be seen as an appropriation of the city, as Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith said in their book ‘Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces’: ‘Because individuals were made to feel negligible when faced with busy city streets and the growing economy,

© Save Lewisham Hospital (2012), Eastlondonlines.

© William Shakespeare, National Portrait

Gallery.

© Rodney Mullen, RMSkater.

© Mobile Interfaces, Amazon.

they longed for a way to individualise their experience of the city.’ As a sign of community activism, we can observe the Southbank council decision of destroying the Southbank skatepark, which the community answered with a ‘LongLiveSouthBank’ movement in honour of the forty years old skatepark who had seen so much history of this skateboard culture. Useless to say, the movement won and the free access skatepark is still open.The modern city is also famous for its high numbers of cultures and social classes, ranging to the richest of the country to the near-poorest. London, for example, is well-known to be proud for its club culture, and as Eddie Piller (Acid Jazz Records, The Blue Note Club Hoxton) commented, over a debate we had at school earlier this semester ‘Culture is created where there is danger, drugs and pimps’ even though he was speaking about music, his point is right: you will not create culture and/or authenticity in the super safe-protected place that is Sloane Square. The gentrification is, one of today’s big questions for the cities’ development, and the importance of bars and clubs remain an important characteristic of a city’s sociability. It is to be cherished and protected especially from the law. But in both cases, what we can observe is that physical interactions in the cities are not dead, and it’s not because we have online lives that we want to say goodbye

© Long Live South Bank, Llsb.

© Eddie Piller,Eddie Piller.

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to our physical lives. Those interactions just need a bit of help to flourish naturally and safely.

After looking at how to interpret big datas and the city as a support for collaboration, I’d like to mention the idea of putting the digital world in our physical world. Inventor Pranav Mistry has done a talk at TedIndia in 2009 which keeps on amazing me, called ‘The Thrilling Potential of SixthSense technology’. It inspired me on the idea that, maybe the screen has a limit date, and soon enough, physical and digital would be one. Hopefully one day, human interactions within the city would be as friendly as a small town in the countryside.

© Pranav Mistry,Ted.

Anthony M. Townsend describes the 21st Century as the Information Revolution period, as opposed to the Industrial Revolution of the 20th Century. In his book he speaks of the big questions which await us. I will look at what it means for us, the designers, and then I will introduce how the tool of design could help those collaborations.

During the last century, the Western countries have allowed its citizens to work less for more, turning around 35hours-40hours/week in Europe. As Clay Shirky defines it in his book, citizens never had so much free time on their hands. The spread of TV in homes allowed people to watch it more than 10 hours a week, sitting in front of a screen. Those hours, multiplied by the number of citizens, soon becomes very big. As Clay Shirky wrote, “The way we use a trillion hours of free-time a year is likely to be a big deal.” Plus, the global issues which are arising will need a real collaboration of ideas to be solved. And that’s where

© Demonstration for 35hours/week (France,2002),Liberation.

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the internet helps. The number of fundraising or petitions websites keeps on growing (Kickstarter, Change), so as collaboration still exists between strangers in cities, so does generosity online. We need to find a way to use that collaboration and generosity in accordance with our needs, and create a real support for it to happen. Collaborative places will hold an important social change in the near-future.There is one issue that creates a lot of argumentation over the specialists, in this Information Revolution: the need to express what is public and what is private. In order to create a good collaboration, we need to make the citizens feel safe. Some like to share every minute of their lives with the world, others don’t even like giving their first name. I believe that privacy is a factor that we can’t overlook, as Christopher Poole says, in his Ted video in February 2010, ‘The Case for Anonymity Online’, ‘And so, what I think is really intriguing about a community like 4chan is just that it’s this open place. As I said, it’s raw, it’s unfiltered. And sites like it are kind of going the way of the dinosaur right now. They’re endangered because we’re moving towards social networking. We’re moving towards persistent identity. We’re moving towards, you know, a lack of privacy, really. We’re sacrificing a lot of that, and I think in doing so, moving towards those things, we’re losing

© Christopher Poole,Ted.

© Screenshot from 4chan website.

© Kickstarter Logo, Kickstarter. © Change Logo,

Change.

something valuable.’ Or as Jamie Bartlett showed over his research of the DarkNet, the drug quality on websites such as SilkRoad have never been so good, and the relationship of the drug-dealer/consumer neither. Why should we judge people for doing what they like? (As long as they’re not killing or hurting anyone, obviously.) I believe the internet is just a showcase of what people actually think, and it’s also a way to go in the direction of things you like, as it proved: there’s always someone else who will appreciate or understand what you have to say. There is no need trying to hide ourselves from reality, we are all weirdos.

Design is a tool to communicate and share ideas. In this Information Revolution, it is natural to expect that design will encourage the sharing of knowledge, and help it spread. But design can also shape the logistics of how we share and spread this knowledge, how would it be the more efficient. Over the past two weeks, I’ve created an observations notebook looking at how strangers were interacting with other strangers in places. If you take out the small-talk that’s documented it becomes apparent that the most fruitful meetings would often occur when the space itself was connected either to education, sports or art & crafts. (See image) However this research has only been conducted over two weeks focusing on what

© Screenshot SilkRoad,SilkRoadDrugs.

© Screenshot from Google Image Search ‘weirdos’.

© My observations notebook.

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I’ve seen. I’m counting on the Christmas break to keep updating this little notebook and observing strangers from different countries. At the moment I strongly believe that Education (libraries for example), Art & Craft (when for example if you go to a graffiti spot, if you don’t disrespect another’s work and have a smile on your face people will be friendly) and Sports (look at how lively Southbank Skatepark is?) is a very good way to make friendly meetings with strangers. Also, one pattern in helping/sharing on the Internet has appeared over and over; information, help and support. In example, the popularity that Memes have attracted online, as ugly as it can be, is still a creative act that follows this pattern; information. Other people’s work, comments, etc are present, and they in turn help too, as the website provides you with all the tools for free to create the artwork. Also support is avaliable as often some kind of Chat or Forum system is featured. If not, there is always another website that does. Same with websites such as KickStarter: informations on the project, help to develop the project -money, and support as you can comment and share the project.

To resume, creating collaboration-friendly places to create new hobbies for our new free time is not a need, but a necessity for our generation. Answering the question of what is private and public is important as we need to defend the citizens

© Screenshot from Meme Generator, imgflip.

© My meme.

from a State-Surveillance time and avoiding back fire from saying what you actually truly think, as in order to create a good space, we need trust. One way to create those places, is to include either education, arts and crafts or sports to the space in question while simplifying the knowledge to access it by giving informations, help and support.

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To conclude and answer the initial question ‘How to Enhance Human Collaboration’, the first step is to use the large reservoir of data as research and crowd source, and the city as a support. Big datas have created a whole new kind of informations and not everything is to be believed, but its value is not worthless either. The cities have been an inspiration source for centuries, mixing people from different background and ideas in crowded spaces, and even though those people are on the internet, nothing is more valuable than human contact. We need to design while conserving the beauty of humanity. Then, after using those two supports, we know that we have to create collaboration-friendly places for people to interact with each others while their free-time, while keeping their privacy intact. At the moment, the best way I’ve found is to enhance the possibilities to be active through education, sports and/or arts and crafts while simplifying the knowledge through giving the informations, help and

support necessary for the activity itself. To me, the big difference of our century, is, instead of our parents and grand-parents looking at the TV, we have a chance to be active and make a difference. Obviously, everyone has their own opinion and difference desires, but being active is going to be huge difference to everything we’ve known in the past. I deeply believe, it’s going to be great.

© Screenshot from Humans of New York Facebook Page.

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Notes:

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