search function, in terms of the "legal moves" (moves allowed by the chosen policy and defined by the created network), is performed in each consecutive node (or a state) that has been occupied, and after which a decision regarding the node to occupy next is made, enabling search and decision-making iterations to continue
I just finished reading this fantastic article, Urban Computing and Its Discontents, by Mark Shepard and Adam Greenfield. [1] My primary takeaway is that I am now able to put names and terms to the phenomenon that I’ve been thinking about. [2]
A state of the world where computing can happen anytime, anywhere. This state takes inputs from the environment, and its outputs can serve any purpose, come in any format: information delivered in, activity by physical actuators (Everyware credit: Adam Greenfield)
Ambient informatics
A state in which information is freely available at the point in space and time someone requires it, generally to support a specific decision. It’s information that is persistently available, “just there, like the air.” We can use any device to access this information, anywhere, and the information can be processed or displayed in different ways depending one our needs and preferences. If computing becomes ubiquitous, it can give rise to a state of ambient informatics, since the actuators everywhere will need to tap on information from wherever they are to perform their tasks.
Locative media
Media elements that are bound to a physical location. E.g. the Pokestops or the Pokemon that are bound to specific locations in the physical world. There are two types of mapping of locative media: annotative (fixed tags on the world), and phenomenological (tracing the actions of the subject in the world). AR can be used to access/reveal locative media, but it’s not the only way. E.g. Yelp/Foursquare accesses tags of locations on a map, but it doesn’t directly augment our experience of the city environment around us.
Read/write urbanism
The idea that the city’s users are no longer forced to experience their surroundings passively but have been empowered to make additions and alterations to the experience, anchored in place, and available perhaps to themselves or to others who pass through that place. E.g. Yelp is a kind of read/write urbanism, Yelp users can read from the software to discover places to go, and write to the software to contribute a review and thus alter the experience/decisions of users that follow. (Credit: Kevin Slavin)
The material substrate vs the technological substrate
The separation that arises when the experience on the personal display (head-mounted displays or mobile device) differs from the material world around the user. This distinction would be important in a mixed-reality world, where technology intervenes in our sensing of the real environment and mediates what we sense. For example, if I pointed my device at a building and the app on my phone overlays that building with a model of what it used to look like 30 years ago, the actual building in front of me is the material substrate while the representation of the building with its overlay on my phone is a separate experience that I am having.
Speculative design
Not a textbook definition, but I love the way Adam Greenfield puts it: “rendering the imaginary out ahead of its technical deployability.”
Deconfliction
The act of reducing the risk of collision among conflicting ideas, preferences, personalities through coordination. In urban computing, it would be important to deconflict the various individual experiences that a group of people demand from the same setting. E.g. if the environment senses anxiety levels and responds to them, but there are several individuals in a space, whose measurement should be prioritized?
Schizogeography
A pretty obscure term used by Adam Greenfield to describe a state where a particular environment hosts contradictory and confusing behavior of the people in it. Technology such as AR will lead to each individual experiencing a different combination of material and virtual realities, which could give rise to such schizogeography. An example would be a shopping mall where a majority of the people in it are shopping, but a small proportion of people are wandering around aimlessly just because they are on their phones, distracted, and are merely looking to staying in motion and avoid collisions.
UPDATE: I just found an even more comprehensive list of urban computing terms here. But listing the above terms out myself was a useful exercise in internalizing these concepts.
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[1] This article was written in 2007. Adam Greenfield wrote Everyware in 2006. These ideas have been around for more than a decade, but haven’t really broken into the public’s awareness. I’d like to suggest that Pokemon Go was the first clear illustration of this subject. Location-specific products have been implemented in the past with occasional side effects, but Pokemon Go was the first that was so widespread in implementation and so popular that all the side effects of location-specific urban computing came into full view simultaneously
[2] It’s funny how knowledge is tied to a set of terms that are sometimes hard to find initially, but when you do discover them you open up a world of past research and discussion that you didn’t know existed. I’m sure there’s a name for this phenomenon, but (in a very meta observation), I would not know the name.
[3] I have to be careful not to get too comfortable with speaking in this industry lingo, though. This would risk making my thesis discussions unintelligible to the layperson. Along my thesis journey I should constantly find ways to make the discussion less technical, less intimidating, (to borrow Adam Greenfield’s explanation for his coming up with the term “everyware”.)
References:
Morais A.R., A Genealogy of Locative Media
Greenfield A. and Shepard M., Urban Computing and Its Discontents
Greenfield A. and Gaffney G,, UXPod Interview: Adam Greenfield on Everyware
“Despite the many-fold increases in computer speed and storage capacity ... there are some researchers who are convinced that it has been the hardware limitations that have obstructed progress and that advances in modeling are now possible because of larger computer capacity. There is no basis for this belief; bigger computers simply permit bigger mistakes.” (Lee, 1973)
Man is no longer the measure of all things. The dimensions of human endeavor have expanded from bodily cubits to incomprehensibly tiny angstroms and incomprehensibly large light years. Architecture, comfortably situated in the middle of this spectrum, and rarely departing from human dimension by more than one or two orders of magnitude, has correspondingly lost authority.
