The NY Times has a pretty interesting interactive map of homicides in NYC dating from 2003 to the present based on data provided by the police department.

Take a look at it here.

My good friends and hyper-talented guys behind studio[mode] – Gil Akos and Ronnie Parsons – have just launched mode[lab], the lab component of their studio. In their own words: mode[lab] “is conceived of as a laboratory and serves as a knowledge base for design research and experimentation. The laboratory is distributed in nature and operates across multiple time-scales and locations ranging from intensive workshops to design studios throughout North America and Europe.

Our primary objective is to discover novel and inventive design solutions through the identification of key concepts relevant to contemporary architectural discourse and the development of related maps of action.”

Smart Cities vehicle prototype.

We just got back from Boston after being invited by MIT to give a lunchtime lecture. My good friend Daniel Cardoso, a PhD candidate there was kind enough to show us around the media lab, where a few -very generous- people showed us some of their work. We had a chance to see the fabrication labs and some of the robotic work being currently done there, and it was absolutely mesmerizing. Dimitris Papanikolaou gave us a full presentation on his Mobility on Demand (MOD) project for the Smart Cities group, not only was that incredibly generous, but an amazingly interesting solution to urban mobility. What I think was among the most interesting thing -not only of his project but of the lab in general- is the reality of it all. A lot of the research being conducted there is for real applications / products / solutions, which is very refreshing to see after having been involved in architecture school for some time now, where a very small percentage of what is produced has real-world implications. We had as well the opportunity to meet up with our friends Carlos Rocha (ex-Media Lab and current Honda scientist) and Skylar Tibbits.

View a few more images after the jump below.

Dimitris Papanikolaou and a MOD vehicle prototype.

Daniel Cardoso showing us some of the work done at the S.A workshops.

Carlos Rocha, Daniel Cardoso and Mike Szivos post lecture.

The Millennium Falcon
ps. Daniel sent me this brief history or the MF.

Hotpads has some impressive heat maps of the foreclosure crisis throughout main cities and regions in the U.S. So far Manhattan is in the clear, but check out how the red is starting to creep up. Scary.

View the interactive map for NYC here.

via [techcrunch]

Funded by NASA and Department of Energy, The Vulcan Project is an effort to quantify the emissions of CO2 within North America at a scale never seen before, up to individual power plants…

Check out their YouTube video here to see some other fantastic visualizations.

via [wired ]

We got back last night from the Van Alen Institute after the opening of The Living City, The Living’s installation. It was pretty interesting seeing the ‘full’ prototype of their wall system up and running. The system is controlled by sensors placed in an office off site which measures air quality and then transmits data through the web to their prototype at the Van Alen. The data is then parsed there and it affects activates their system, which adjusts the opening of its ‘gills’ in real-time to the oscillations in air quality.

More pics after the jump below.

The night before…

David Benjamin

It is alive!

Soo-In Yang and Natalie Jeremijenko

Soo-In Yang and Natalie Jeremijenko

The opening for our good friends David and Soo-In Yang -aka The Living – at the Van Alen Institute is tonight. Their project ‘Living City’ will be on display from December 11th to January 18th.

Living City is about the future…when building’s systems react in real-time to dynamic stimuli and the buildings communicate with each other, creating a large network of ‘living’ organisms.

Living City is a full-scale prototype building skin designed to open and close its gills in response to air quality.

SOFTlab collaborated with The Living on the creation of two videos featured in the installation.

More info on the project here and at the Van Alen site here.

We’ll be there at the opening tonight so I’ll post some images later on.

Incredible pictures of the massive fires in California. I wonder when the plume of smoke will hit China…

Read about it in the Nasa site here and their earth observatory here. View a short clip from the satellite here.

Matt Fox has some overlays for Google Earth in his blog as well as some other resources from the Google Earth community here.

Here is a fantastic project by Tad Hirsch, a researcher and PhD candidate in the Smart Cities Group at MIT’s Media Lab.

Tripwire is a site-specific installation responding to the unique relationship between the Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport and downtown San Jose, CA. Custom-built sensors hidden inside coconuts are hung from trees at several public locations to monitor noise produced by overflying aircraft. Detection of excessive aircraft noise triggers automated telephone calls to the airport’s complaint line on behalf of the city’s residents and wildlife. Documentation of noise incidents is archived for later analysis.

See more on the project here.

via [guerrilla innovation]

I had come across this experiment a couple of weeks ago but forgot to post it. Today, poking around my bookmarks I found it again.
It’s done in Processing and it displays about 3000 flocking elements. More on the project here.

And by all means, check the site All Manner of Distractions out. There are some amazing experiments in there.

I just came across this BBC interactive map of the violence in Baghdad.
It is both disturbing and fascinating to see the progression of violence linked to specific locations in the city. The statistics are from Iraqi Body Count and you can read more about their methodology in their website.

View the interactive map here.

Google has launched ‘My Maps’, where the creation and distribution of customized maps is a very simple process. ‘MyMaps’ gives you the ability to draw lines, create polygons and insert placemarks with just a simple click. Images and video can be embedded onto the description window as well (you’ll have to do it manually though). So, it won’t be long until we start seeing some very interesting mappings of cities. Guy Debord and the situationists would’ve been delighted.

Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar have been harvesting human emotions from blogs since 2005. It’s quite impressive.
Check the site here