Go Out and Play With the City: Matt Jones's Demon-Haunted World
Sarah Kuck, 7 Apr 09
Pressing his finger firmly against the rapid heartbeat of urban intellectual infrastructure, designer Matt Jones has created a stunning slideshow on informatics that takes a look at all the things that make cities alive that you can't see with the naked eye. These are the conversations, signals and patterns that we are constantly creating, and are now enhancing, mapping and transforming with innovative software technology.
In his presentation, The Demon-Haunted World, he takes a look at the magical things that can happen when people mesh software with cities. This slideshow is chock-full of Worldchanging ideas, many of which we've written about before (see our archives for more on: guerrilla gardening, Street As Platform, Biomapping, OpenStreetMap, Everyblock, Fix My Street, and Feral Robot Dogs).
My favorite part of clicking through this slideshow (other than the comparison between the OpenStreetMap paths through London and Neuron Pathways on slides 63 and 64), is seeing how people are taking hold of software and using it to explore their world and make it a better place. As Jones says, the future is transparent, open, sustainable, and up to us.
The Demon-Haunted World
View more documents from Matt Jones.
Thanks to Emily Gertz for reminding me this was out there!
Thanks for the post. It is a great presentation, I love this whole notion of creating our own invisible world (and/or revealing it).
Right now reading William Gibson's Spook Country which is tackling similar ground .
Posted by: adrian cotter on 7 Apr 09
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