Fade to Play

Today is World Water Day and the fourth year of the Water for Life Decade.

The Water for Life Decade 2005-2015 will give a high profile to implementing water-related programmes and the participation of women. The UN hopes that the Decade will boost the chances of achieving international water-related goals and the United Nations Millennium Declaration.

In Canada, there are a number of initiatives promoting water as a public right such as the Blue Communities Project and World Water Week events in British Columbia.

According to Oxfam Canada:

• 890 million people – about a seventh of the world’s population – do not have access to safe drinking water.

• Some 2.5 billion people also live without access to basic sanitation.

• 1.2 billion of which have no access to any form of sanitation.

What is really cool is how social media (e.g. twitter, blogs, Slideshare) are being used to promote safe drinking water:

Leslie Bradshaw tweeted about how her followers on twitter could get involved. Each person that follows @WorldH20 or @chlorine on twitter or joins the corresponding Facebook group would result in 100 liters of water being donated to those in need.

According to Leslie Bradshaw:

The project itself has been made possible by the American Chemistry Council (a client I have enjoyed working with via New Media Strategies), in partnership with GOOD Magazine, Population Services International and a group of leading health organizations.

This is a great cause, so get on twitter and Facebook and help out. Each of us can play our part.

Relevance: shows the power of social media

One of the cool aspects about living in Vancouver is the opportunity to participate and learn about interesting urban opportunities in which people hack and re-interpret public spaces through art or play.

For example, Kristina Lee Podesva, a Vancouver-based artist has created a langarapublicart.ca project that is pretty cool. She is the inaugural Artist in Residence Program at the Langara College Centre for Art in Public Spaces.


According to the website:

The Langara College Centre for Art in Public Spaces was formed in 2008 as an innovative approach to the public art requirement of the City of Vancouver. The Centre has a mission to engage communities in the research, production and presentation of art in the public realm. The Centre encourages dialogue, and fosters opportunities to collaborate on, experience and learn about art in public spaces.

The 2008 – 2009 Program includes a public Speakers Series and Curriculum Development initiatives in addition to the Artist in Residence Program.

Project: This is a Vehicle

THIS IS A VEHICLE is a collaborative, online work by Kristina Lee Podesva, Artist in Residence at the Langara College Centre for Art in Public Spaces. THIS IS A VEHICLE represents one aspect of Podesva’s overall residency project, Vehicle, which re-purposes shipping containers as “reading rooms” and as discursive sites for thinking through the experience and phenomena of globalization. Similarly, THIS IS A VEHICLE invites participants to re-purpose everyday and not-so-everyday objects by imagining their new and uncommon functions

Dates: January 13 – April 21, 2009
Hours: Mon – Thurs, 4-8pm
Opening Night: January 13, 7pm

Location: Langara College, 100 West 49 Ave, Vancouver.

I am participating in the project by sending a couple of photos that I have reappropriated to info @ thisisavehicle.com.

This is a Vehicle



for

holding conference badges

Relevance: Public spaces should continually be re-mixed, hacked, and reappropriated by the public. Let’s keep urban spaces as people places.

Thanks to a tweet and post by djvibe of Vancouver, I discovered the The Obama Mix by DJ Z-Trip, which is a mix of music, political thought, and famous text.

Download the Obama Mix here.

It was created to help encourage people to get involved in the election process.
DJ Z-Trip worked with artist Shepard Fairey of Obey (who created the Obey Hope poster among others) to organise Obama fundraisers. The Obama Mix by DJ Z-Trip is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

And for those of us in Vancouver, DJ Z-Trip is coming with Bassnectar to the Commodore on Nov 22nd ($35).

Flickr photo courtesy of sallylondon

On CNN’s page there is an interesting article regarding research in Kenya exploring the social behaviour of zebras. Princeton researchers under a collaborative program called ZebraNet, have attached GPS devices to the necks of Grevy and Plains zebras. A particular emphasis behind the program is to gather data from the Grevy zebras, an endangered species whose numbers have dropped to 2000, as they social network, avoid becoming prey, and interact with others.

As a doctoral student at Duke University, Rubenstein was fascinated with how animals make decisions and why their societies form the way they do. He started studying equids — a family of mammals that includes horses, donkeys, and zebras — because they form associations among strangers.

He has also examined how the Grevy’s zebra social network — and he doesn’t mean Facebook or MySpace — may contribute to its endangerment. Associations between Grevy’s zebras are less close-knit than those of the Plains zebra, whose core societies consist of closed-membership harem-groups and bachelor groups.

In a harem, several females choose to live with one male that protects them against harassment in exchange for sex. Female Grevy’s zebras, on the other hand, don’t stay with one male for long periods of time, meaning they don’t have the benefit of a larger male watching out for them.

Relevance: I have Social Media and Location based Systems interests in relation to their use by humans. What can we learn from the animal kingdom and their social networks that is of relevance to our own everyday lives and research?

When is money used as a place holder rather than having monetary value?

In the game of pool, there are social conventions that exist regarding the desire to use the pool table next. One places a coin (e.g. a quarter) on the table above where the slot exists to insert money. On Mondays at this establishment, the pool table was free to use, yet the convention is still being followed.

Relevance: Is this convention unique to pool? Is it universal in other cultures outside of North America?

Yesterday was a busy day for me. I gave a presentation at the Media Annotations and Tagging workshop by MAGIC entitled “Playing tag in user-generated spaces” in which I discussed tagging in Facebook and Flickr.

I then attended a photowalk in Gastown (a section of Vancouver) organised by Kris Krüg that evening and afterwards we uploaded our photos to Flickr and and Facebook using appropriate tags to categorise our content. Some of us also became new friends/contacts on Flickr and Facebook.

After the walk Kris yelled out that we use a standardised tag “gastownphotowalk2″ to link our photos on flickr together. If you attend conferences, workshops, meetups, you will hear the organisers request that a common tag be used to link photos/blog entries related to the event. Although people believe in the power of the folksonomy, a little top-down intervention is very effective and sometimes necessary.

The result of using “gastownphotowalk2″ is that we are one of the hot tags of the last 24 hours on flickr. Sweet.

Check out our photos here.

Relevance: I am finding that I living what I research regarding tagging in flickr and facebook. It helps me better understand the culture of these spaces when I use these spaces daily because of my real world interactions and meetups. Having friends that live in these digital environments is quite beneficial.

Which symbols in society are universally recognised and which are particular to certain cultures?

Within Canada there are a variety of cues that people use to distinguish between washrooms for the males and females. Usually it involves looking at the door for an identifying symbol or word such as “Men” or “Women”. However, this is not always foolproof. I have been in a club where two doors beside each other were labelled as such with arrows pointing to the other door.

It was quite easy to miss the arrow and to enter a washroom that was different from what one had intended. Perhaps that was the intent of the club’s owners.

Relevance: Are there cultures where this symbol would be misunderstood? When are words preferable to convey information versus symbols.

The Times Online from May 14th discusses Jan Chipchase and how he is exploring what mobile phones will look like in 2022.

Emerging markets’ potential explains Mr Chipchase’s taste for mobile minutiae. Nokia’s patchy record – it missed a trend towards clamshell phones – is also factor. His basic mission, however, is to root out the motivation behind people’s behaviour, on the basis that it will not alter by the year 2022.

He is particularly interested in ad hoc mobile banking that has sprung up in Uganda, which uses prepayment systems as deposit accounts and relies on shopowners to make good promises to turn credits back into cash. “The question is: how do we design for people’s needs?” he says.

Relevance: As I am reading The Cell Phone (2006) by Heather Horst and Daniel Miller, I am aware of differences in how people in Jamaica that are of low income use mobile phones differently than myself. I wonder what other technologies do people make specific to a particular culture.

In Canada, throughout classrooms and lecture halls, when someone wants to share information with a wide body of people, they will leave a note in the top right corner of the blackboard.

There isn’t any indication of the status of the person that left the message. They might be a teacher or a student.

The important cues that are used to let others know that the message is important and shouldn’t be erased are: 1. create a border that will separate it from the rest of the board and 2. write the initial PLO which means ‘Please Leave On’. Sometimes the writer will also note a date that it can be erased.

The presence of the PLO initials tells the cleaning staff or the teacher not to remove the message.

Relevance: What other cues to other cultures use to convey the importance of messages maintaining permanency?

18-year-old Katie Barnard’s prom date text-messaged her one hour before the big night that he couldn’t make it. (Laura Leyshon for the Globe and Mail)

This Globe and Mail article once again highlights a trend in teen/college dating today. Mobile and digital technologies are being used to supplement actual voice communication such as a phone call or a face-to-face meeting. Everyone uses Facebook and on Facebook is where you find out how your ex’s are doing, who your friends are dating, and about the dating status of _potentials_.

Stephanie, a 22-year-old living in Toronto, has a different problem: She broke up with her boyfriend in the real world, but can’t remove his presence from her virtual life. She hasn’t logged onto Facebook in four months, except to delete his name from the status line on her profile — “that’s kind of replaced getting rid of old letters and postcards.”

His face is in her photo albums, his friends are on his contact list, his comments archived on her wall. She’s not pining, she says, but it would be tempting to peek at his page. “You just have to click a button and you can instantly see how their whole world has changed since you left it.” She misses being on Facebook. “You have to cut off your relationship with this whole online world to cut off your relationship with one person.”

Relevance: An excellent article outlining some of the privacy concerns felt by today’s teens and young people as they balance the need for companionship with their desire to remain in touch with their friends using the _it_ social networking tool which right now is Facebook.