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- Designing for Serendipity
- Mixed Use Spaces
- Spaces send signals
- Local Maxima
How Cities Work 
In 1952, French sociologist Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe asked a young political science student to keep a journal of her daily movements as part of his city study "Paris et l’agglomération parisienne". He mapped her paths onto a map of Paris and saw the emergence of a triangle, with vertices at her apartment, her university and the home of her piano teacher. Her movements illustrate, "the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives." That pattern of home, work and hobby - whether it's a comparatively solitary activity like piano studies or the "great good place" of public socialization celebrated by Ray Oldenburg - is a familiar one to social scientists. Most of us are fairly predictable. Nathan Eagle, who has worked with Sandy Pentland at MIT's Media Lab on the idea of "reality mining", digesting huge sets of data like mobile phone records, estimates that he can predict the location of "low-entropy individuals" with 90-95% accuracy based on this type of data. (Those of us with less predictable schedules and movements might be only 60% predictable, a number that somehow fails to reassure me.)clxix We might choose to see our predictability as evidence of contentment and lives well lived. Or we can react as situationist cultural critic Guy Debord did and decry the "outrage at the fact that anyone’s life can be so pathetically limited." One way or another, the likelihood we will be confronted with one of these maps is increasing. 
Zach Seward, outreach editor for the Wall Street Journal, is a heavy Foursquare user. As he checks in at venues in and around New York City, he generates a "heat map" of his wanderings. It's easy to see a heavy concentration around Manhattanville, where he lives, and midtown, where he works. With a bit more work, we can see that he enjoys hanging out in the East Village, rarely strays into the "outer boroughs" except to fly from LaGuardia airport and to watch baseball games - the one venue he's checked into in the Bronx is Yankee Stadium. And because he's visited one of New York's stadiums and not the other, we can make an educated guess that he's a Yankees fan.clxx If you're using Foursquare, you're broadcasting the data that can be used to make a map like this one. Yiannis Kakavas has developed a software package called "Creepy" designed to allow users - or people watching users - to build maps like this one from information posted on Twitter, Flickr and other geolocated services. Creepier, perhaps, is the discovering that you're leaking this data simply by using a mobile phone. While you may not be interested in suing your mobile phone provider to obtain this data, as German politician Malte Spitz did, it's likely they have highly accurate data on your movements, which could be released to law enforcement on request... or perhaps used to build a behavioral profile to target ads to you. Seward took a close look at his Foursquare check-ins and discovered they provide a piece of profile information he hadn't realized he was providing: his race. He overlaid his check-ins in Harlem over a map that showed the racial composition of each block and discovered that "his" Harlem is almost exclusively blocks that are majority-white. As he observes, "Census data can describe the segregation of my block, but how about telling me how segregated my life is? Location data points in that direction." It's worth pointing out that Seward is neither a racist, nor is he "pathetically limited", as Debord suggests. We all filter the places we live into the places where we're regulars and the ones we avoid, the parts of town where we feel familiar and where we feel foreign. We do this based on where we live, where we work, and who we like to spend time with. If we had enough data from enough New Yorkers, we could build maps of Dominican New York, Pakistani New York, Chinese New York, as well as black and white New Yorks. The patterns we trace through our cities show the effects of who we are, who we know, and what we do - taken as a whole, they become maps of personal and group homophily. When we talk about cities, we recognize that they're not always the cosmopolitan melting pots we dream they are. We acknowledge the ethnic character of neighborhoods, and we're conscious of ghettos that get separated, through a combination of physical structure and cumulative behavior, from the rest of the city. We hope for random encounter with a diverse citizenry to build a web of weak ties that increases our sense of involvement in the community, as Bob Putnam suggested in Bowling Alone. And we worry that we may instead isolate and cocoon ourselves when faced with a situation where we feel like outsiders, as Putnam's more recent research suggests. Isolation can occur online as well, of course. The biases of curated media make some parts of the world less visible than others. Navigating through search means brings our personal biases to the front. I get to learn about topics I care about - sumo, African politics, Vietnamese cooking - but it's quite possible that I miss topics that I needed to know about because I was paying more attention to my interests and less to curators. We need mechanisms to ensure that search gets complemented with serendipity. A recent wave of web tools tries to guide us to novel content by examining what our friends care about. Community-based tools like Reddit, Digg and Slashdot have formed communities around shared interests and direct us to stories the community agreed (through voting and karma mechanisms) is interesting and worth sharing. Twitter, and especially Facebook, work on a much more personal level. They show us what our friends know and believe is important. Or as Brad DeLong puts it, Facebook offers a different answer to the question, "What do I need to know?" - "You need to know what your friends and your friends of friends already know that you do not."clxxi The problem, of course, is that if your friends don't know about a revolution in Tunisia or a great new Vietnamese restaurant, you may not know either. Knowing what your friends know is important. But unless you've got a remarkably diverse and well-informed set of friends, there's a decent chance that their collective intelligence has some blind spots. Guardian columnist Paul Carr tells an instructive story about returning to a San Francisco hotel room and being baffled that it, and the rest of the hotel, hadn't been cleaned that day. The hotel workers were protesting the Arizona immigration bill, SB1070, and while there was extensive conversation about the protests and the legislation on Twitter, they weren't taking place on feeds Carr followed on Twitter. By missing the protests (until they manifested as an unmade bed in his room), Carr realized that he was living in "my own little Twitter bubble of People Like Me: racially, politically, linguistically and socially."clxxii It's worth asking whether that bubble is able to provide us with the serendipity we hope for from the web. If not, it's worth asking what we can do to escape it. Serendipity Robert K. Merton devoted a book, written with collaborator Elinor Barber and published posthumously, to the topic of serendipity. This may seem an odd exploration for a celebrated sociologist, but it's worth remembering that one of his many contributions to the field was an examination of "unintended consequences". Serendipity, at first glance, looks like the positive side of unintended consequences, the happy accident. But that's not what the term meant, at least originally. The word was coined by Horace Walpole, an 18th century British aristocrat, 4th Earl of Oxford, novelist, architect and gossip. He's remembered primarily for his letters, 48 volumes worth, which offer a perspective on what the world looked like through an English aristocrat's eyes. In a letter written in 1754, Walpole tells his correspondent, Horace Mann, about a unexpected and helpful discovery he made, due to his deep knowledge of heraldry. To explain the experience, he refers to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the titular characters were "always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of." Walpole's neologism is a pat on the back - he's congratulating himself both for a clever discovery and for his sagacity, which permitted the discovery. Useful as the concept is, the word "serendipity" didn't come into wide use until the past couple of decades. By 1958, Merton tells us, it had appeared in print only 135 times. In the next four decades, it appeared in book titles 57 times, and graced newspapers 13,000 times in the 1990s alone. A Google search turns up 11 million pages with the term, including restaurants, movies and gift shops named "serendipity", but very few on unexpected discovery through sagacity. Merton was one of the major promoters of the word, writing about "the serendipity pattern" in 1946 as a way of understanding unexpected scientific discoveries. Fleming's discovery of penicillin in 1928 was triggered by a spore of Penicillium fungus that contaminated a petri dish where he was growing Staphylococcus bacteria. While the mold spore landing in the dish was an accident, the discovery was serendipity - had Fleming not been cultivating bacteria, he wouldn't have noticed a stray mold spore. And had Fleming not had a deep understanding of bacterial development - sagacity - it's unlikely he would have noticed the antibiotic properties of Penicillium and developed the most important advance in health technology of the first half of the 20th century. Louis Pasteur observed, "In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind." Merton believed that serendipity emerged both from a prepared mind and from circumstances and structures conducive to discovery. In The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity, he and Barber explore discovery in a General Electric laboratory under the leadership of Willis Whitney, who encouraged a work environment that focused as much on fun as it did on discovery. A healthy blend of anarchy and structure was necessary for discovery, and over-planning was anathema as "the policy of leaving nothing to chance is inherently doomed by failure." The idea that serendipity is a product both of an open and prepared mind and of circumstances conducive to discovery can be traced back to the story referenced by Walpole in 1754. The three princes were deeply learned in "Morality, Politicks and all polite Lerning in general", but they did not make their unexpected discoveries until their father, the Emperor Jafer, sent them out from his kingdom to "travel through all the World, to the end that they might learn the Manners and Customs of every nation." Once the well-prepared Princes met circumstances conducive to discovery, unexpected and sagacious discoveries occurred. When we use the word "serendipity" now, it's usually to mean "a happy accident". The parts of the definition that focus on sagacity, preparation and structure have slipped, at least in part, into obscurity. As the word has changed meaning, we have lost sight of the idea that we could prepare ourselves for serendipity, both personally and structurally. I suspect that we - and even Merton - understand those preparations poorly. And as my friend, legal scholar Wendy Seltzer pointed out to me, if we don't understand the structures of serendipity, it appears no more likely than random chance. Designing for Serendipity If we want to create online spaces to encourage serendipity, we might start by learning from cities. In the early 1960s, a fierce public battle erupted over the future of New York City. The proximate cause of the battle was the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a proposed ten-lane elevated highway that would have connected the Holland Tunnel (which links Manhattan and New Jersey under the Hudson River) to the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges (which cross the East River and connect Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens.) Plans for the highway required the demolition of 14 blocks along Broome Street in Little Italy and Soho, and would have displaced roughly two thousand families and eight hundred businesses. The proponent of the plan was Robert Moses, the legendarily influential urban planner responsible for much of New York's park and highway systems, the nemesis blamed by Langdon Winner for blocking buses from Jones Beach. His fiercest opponent was Jane Jacobs, activist, author and chairperson in 1962 of the "Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway". The lasting legacy of Jacobs's opposition to Moses is both the survival of Broome Street and her masterwork, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", which is both a critique of "rationalist" urban planning and a manifesto for preserving and designing vibrant urban communities. Jacobs framed many of her battles over urban planning by asking whether cities were for the benefit of cars or of people, suggesting Moses's indifference to the people he proposed to displace. A slightly less biased frame might be to observe that Moses took a bird's-eye, city-wide view of urban planning while Jacobs offered a pedestrian-eye, street level view of the city. From Moses's point of view, one of the major challenges of a city is allowing people to move rapidly from their homes in the suburbs to business districts in the center of cities, and back out to the "necklace" of parks he'd painstakingly constructed in the outer boroughs. This principle of separation of uses - residential neighborhoods separate from business districts, separated from recreation areas - was one of the main foci of Jacobs's critique. What makes cities livable, creative, vital, and ultimately, safe is the street-level random encounter that Jacobs documented in her corner of Greenwich Village. In neighborhoods where blocks are small, pedestrians are welcome and there's a mixture of residential, commercial and recreational destinations, there's a vibrancy that's thoroughly absent from planned residential-only communities or from city centers that empty out when offices close. That vibrancy comes from the ongoing chance encounter between people using a neighborhood for different purposes, encountering one another as their paths intersect and cross. Jacobs's vision of a livable city has been a major influence on urban design since the early 1980s, with the rise of "New Urbanism" and the walkable cities movement. These cities tend to favor public transit over private automobiles, and create spaces that encourage people to interact and mix, in mixed-use neighborhoods and pedestrian-friendly shopping streets. As urban planner David Walters observes, they're designed to help individuals linger and mix: "Casual encounters in shared spaces are the heart of community life, and if urban spaces are poorly designed, people will hurry through them as quickly as possible."clxxiii If there's an overarching principle to street-level design, it's a pattern of designing to minimize isolation. Walkable cities make it harder for you to isolate yourself in your home or your car, and easier to interact in public spaces. In the process, they present residents with a tradeoff - it's convenient to be able to park your car outside your home, but walkable cities ask you to be suspicious of too much convenience. The neighborhoods Jacobs celebrates are certainly not the most efficient in terms of an individual's ability to move quickly and independently. Vibrancy and efficiency may not be diametrically opposed, but it's likely that the forces are in tension. Cities embody political decisions make by their designers. So do online spaces. But urban planners tend to be more transparent about their agendas. Urban planners will declare an intention to create a walkable city with the logic that they believe increased use of public space will improve civic life. And, in the best of cases, planners test to see what works and report failures when they occur - the persistence of private car use in walking cities, for instance. It's much harder to get the architects behind Facebook or Foursquare articulate the behaviors they're trying to enable and the political assumptions that inform those decisions. Many of the people who are designing online spaces are trying to increase exposure to diverse range of information and to cultivate serendipity. But it's difficult to accomplish, in part because it's too easy to start from scratch in building online spaces. An urban planner who wants to make changes to a city's structure is held in check by a matrix of forces: a desire to preserve history, the needs and interests of businesses and residents in existing communities, the costs associated with executing new projects. Progress is slow, and as a result, we've got a rich history of cities we can study to see how earlier citizens, architects and planners have solved these problems. It's possible to gain inspirations about the future of Lagos by walking the streets of Boston or Rome. For those planning the future of Facebook, it's hard to study what's succeeded and failed for MySpace, in part because an exodus of users to Facebook is gradually turning MySpace into a ghost town. It's harder yet to study earlier communities, like LamdaMOO or Usenet of the early 1980s. I often find myself nostalgic for Tripod, the proto-social network I helped build in the late 1990s. The admirable Internet Archive includes several dozen snapshots of pages on the site from 1997 - 2000, which gives a sense for the changing look and feel, but doesn't give much insight into the content created by the 18 million users of the site in 1998. Tripod's more successful competitor, Geocities, disappeared from the web entirely in 2010 - it's legacy is less than 23,000 pages stored accessible through the Wayback Machine, which threw up its hands at the impossible task of archiving the vast site in mid-2001. If we learn from real-world cities instead of abandoned digital ones, what lessons might we take? (And from here, we move into outline) Mixed Use Spaces What Jacobs celebrates is a lively street life, the product of people using the same space for different uses intricate sidewalk ballet “Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with improvisations.” tremendous difference in behaviors on platforms like Facebook – could be the source of inspiration, chance to see how others are using, what they’re talking about also the ability to isolate yourself from it, get to what you want efficiently - danger of replacing the Jacobs potential for encounter with the unexpected... The Jacobs/Moses debate suggests we need to be cautious of architectures that offer convenience and charge isolation as a price of admission Pariser’s worry that between Google's personalized search and the algorithmic decisions Facebook makes in displaying news from our friends, our online experience is an increasingly isolated one, which threatens to deprive us from serendipitous encounter. Filter bubbles are comfortable, comforting and convenient - they give us a great deal of control and insulate us from surprise. They're cars, rather than public transit or busy sidewalks. With the rise of Facebook's "like" button on sites across the web, we're starting to see personalization come into play even on heavily curated sites like the New York Times. I can access whatever stories I want, but I also get signals of which of my friends have "liked" the story I'm reading, and what other stories they've liked as well. It's not hard to imagine a future where "like" informs even more information spaces. In the near future, I expect to be able to pull up an online map of Vancouver and see my friend's favorite restaurants overlaid on top of it. (I can already, using Dopplr, but I expect to see this functionality creeping into Mapquest, if not Google Maps, at some point soon.) Whether that scenario is exciting or troubling has a lot to do with whether I see only my friends' recommendations, and whether I can see the favorites of other communities too. As Eli observes, the filters we really have to worry about are those that are opaque about their operations and on by default. A map of Vancouver overlaid with my friends' recommendations is one thing; one that recommends restaurants based on paid advertisements and doesn't reveal this practice is another entirely. The map I want is the one that lets me shuffle not just through my friends' preferences but through annotations from different groups: first time visitors to the city; long-time Vancouverites; foodies; visitors from Japan, Korea or China. Spaces send signals desire lines popularity When we wander a city, we encounter thousands of signals about ways other people use the space. The crowd waiting to get into one bar and the empty stools in another; a lively basketball court in one playground, mothers with toddlers in another, unused benches in a third. People's actions inscribe their intentions onto a city. The newly planted grass in a park becomes crisscrossed with paths, worn to dirt by people's footsteps. Frustrating as these "desire lines" are for landscapers, they send invaluable signals to urban planners about where people are coming from and going to, and how they want to use a space. Online spaces are often so anxious to show me how my friends are using a space that they obscure how other audiences are using it. In the run up to revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, an enormous amount of reporting (and a not-insignificant amount of organizing) took place on Facebook. If you didn't have friends in those countries, and specifically in those movements, that activity was entirely invisible. It's possible to find out what's popular on Facebook to an audience broader than that of your friends. The Pages directory shows stars, bands and brands with audiences in the hundreds of thousands and millions - strolling through it is a pretty fascinating tour of what's popular in the Philippines, Colombia and Nigeria, as well as in the US or Canada. Facebook has the data on the desire lines, but they bury it deep within a site rather than bringing it front and center. Twitter's Trending Topics in an example of making these desire lines visible - we may not know what "Cala Boca Galvao" means when it shows up as a trending topic, or care that #welovebieber, but at least we get indications of what matters to those outside of our list of friends. Twitter and racial segregation – most striking because there’s an easy way to see what’s going on in another community. But insufficient to lead to cross-participation – probably a need for bridging, translation. Local Maxima One of the pieces of information conveyed by the signals spaces send what's popular with who Facebook pages and the Dave Arnold algorithm twitter lists and the emergence of experts - who's the best known, loved in a specific space - not Lady Gaga but the expert on a specific topic One of the reasons curation is such a helpful strategy for wandering is that it reveals community maxima. It can be helpful to know that Times Square is the most popular tourist destination in New York if only so we can avoid it. But knowing where Haitian taxi cab drivers go for goat soup is often useful data on where the best Haitian food is to be found. Don't know if you like Haitian food? Try a couple of the local maxima - the most important places to the Haitian community - and you'll be able to discern the answer to that question pretty quickly. It's unlikely you dislike the food because it's badly made, as it's the favorite destination for that community - it's more likely that you simply don't like goat soup. (Oh well, more for me.) If you want to explore beyond the places your friends think are the most enjoyable, or those the general public thinks are enjoyable, you need to seek out curators who are sufficiently far from you in cultural terms and who've annotated their cities in their own ways. Directory: papers papers -> From Warfighters to Crimefighters: The Origins of Domestic Police Militarization papers -> The Tragedy of Overfishing and Possible Solutions Stephanie Bellotti papers -> Prospects for Basic Income in Developing Countries: a comparative Analysis of Welfare Regimes in the South papers -> Weather regime transitions and the interannual variability of the North Atlantic Oscillation. Part I: a likely connection papers -> Fast Truncated Multiplication for Cryptographic Applications papers -> Reflections on the Industrial Revolution in Britain: William Blake and J. M. W. Turner papers -> This is the first tpb on this product papers -> Basic aspects of hurricanes for technology faculty in the United States papers -> Title Software based Remote Attestation: measuring integrity of user applications and kernels Authors Download 0.54 Mb. Share with your friends:
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