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Used to be a FONA #UTBAF - with perhaps less architectural charm than #UTBAPH (used to be a Pizza Hut)

Autopsy of a Retail Zombie

When I visited two FONA shops on their deathbed for the very last time, I found the familiar brick and mortar store bleak and depressing. It's insides had withered away by over 90% on this last day of life. Most sections were already police taped-off after a week of liquidation. The employee at FONA Frederiksberg had stuck it out to the end. He seemed deflated as I asked him if I could try one of the iPhone cases, then courteous as I paid and he handed me the shopping bag for the last time. A team of employees at the Norreport location were in a better mood. The three young men gossiped in a circle while somewhat ignoring the few customers. Perhaps they had learned that people now came in only to raise their eyebrows at the two dozen randomly depressing items laid bare on a table. As I left the fourth employee yelled down from upstairs before using the handrail as a slide from to get downstairs. The others cheered at his optimism.

What was left to sell at the very end at FONA was the saddest array of products; items that could serve as clues in the death of a stubborn electronics retailer. There were ancient Nokia chargers still waiting for their owner. A basket offered ink cartridges from each of the major printer brands, themselves part of an overpriced racket facing an increasingly paperless society. A small selection of DVDs (300kr - $50) remained shelf-bound in a streaming age that will give you a whole month of unlimited viewing for less than 100kr. Two TV aerials lay half out of their boxes, now just metal sticks in a digital broadcast era. Some of these products are now niche artifacts in a time when they have superior replacements, revolutions of better technological advancements and value for money. Yet they remain here to the bitter end, much like FONA has all these years.

I still wonder why they carried on refusing to price match when I asked them about TV models two years ago, or when they charged people like me 350 kroner for a tv cable last year. I suppose they thought offering hands-on service still had its place to a certain loyal and aging demographic, that people trust and like local shops more, or maybe even that some Danes are insensitive to overpriced tech. I do agree that local still matters - however this was a stubborn case of how not to do it. To be an uncompromising zombie is suicide in a digital media and Internet shopping where big ticket items arrive at your door without service fees. It's a bittersweet end for me, the customer, hoping only that a better local experience will emerge from the ashes. #RIPFONA

If you have never heard 'This American Life', listen to this episode that chronicles the last week of liquidation at Circuit City as recounted by employees. It's a fascinating, funereal tale. http://m.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/377/scenes-from-a-recession?act=3#act-3

tweetarchivist

As a Danish PhD student in social media and data visualization, I find Tweet Archivist a valuable part of the tool chain in collecting raw post-level data that can then be visualized. At our Computational Social Science Lab (CSSL) at Copenhagen Business School we have been archiving tweets...

Mapping Stays by Triangulating Foursquare Checkins

Here is an example at a larger scale - Explore checkins in Barcelona from the past week, as they were harnessed using a tweet language query triangulation method.

Our research during the next month plans to replicate this process across several cities with signals of affiliation from social media. Our theoretical research pinpointed signals of affinity (likes), appreciation (photos), lingering (check-in), and buzz (twitter volume). By attempting to map several of these on the city grid we are thus mapping the relationships we have with our city as they are reflected in the online public sphere.

Stay tuned this next month for more blog posts documenting our results :-)

Our work, as always, has been largely inspired by Jan Gehl's methods from half century of measuring public life. It took him decades to get these recognized, and I doubt the art or science of digital countings and how to measure urban qualities will progress very quickly. In the meantime we will continue to let the data speak for itself, humbly letting crowdsourced patterns help us naively understand the less ephemeral (but also less contextual) emissions of public life that exist online.

A combination of online tools, raw data and mapping software is then used to collect, organize and make sense of our emissions within the city. The first image shows Placa Reial as people document their interactions with Instagram photos this week. Most of them are in the center of the square, but some are at the cafes on the perimeter.

After then gathering raw data for tweets in the square, we can then custom map the 21 geolocated tweets from the past week, out of 120 total tweets. Several of them overlap, possibly because they were attached to a "place" with pre-designated coordinates in an app, rather than the tweet's own coordinates (or Mobile phone rather). Many of these were "I'm here" checkins cross-shared from foursquare.

How do people use the square? On the day it was examined, this tranquil space between hospital and library buildings provided a large variance of usage from students studying, tourists photographing, locals lingering, smokers smoking questionable substances, picnicers eating market snacks, chess players, etc. These observations of what people do in the square can then be better understood in the individual online postings when analyzing across time and space online.

How many cafes does the square have? Counting sub-locations is an important consideration to the effects of the umbrella location of, say, a shopping mall for individual stores. In a way there is a symbiotic relation between the two both in real life and online when people check-in to one or the other (or both). This small but thoughtfully re-designed square benefits in checkins from several cafes and restaurants within its small perimeter, each contributing to extra check-ins of experiencing the square en-terasse.

Google maps can help with a remote assessment of businesses that occupy larger places. In addition Google street view can give the urban informatics researcher a periscope of street-life when it offers a 360 degree panoramic of the square in question, in this case Placa del Sol which has a high density of lively interaction between the place and sub-locations.

The Coffee Cup Metric - Musings from one of many cafes on Placa Reial, having only seen one to-go coffee cup in four days of extensive (and caffinated) field work.

Broad question: How does the built space's reflect the activities of the people who use it?

We seek to answer this question in the online sense, rather than literal one shown here in the ceiling of the Encants Barcelona flea market.

How many people mark up places in this parc by taking photos or talking about it, where precisely do they do so, and to what purpose? These are the questions we seek to investigate. A preliminary audit shows the following results for the first two questions, with 3589 people who "were here" digitally on Facebook, 2675 actual check-ins on location (foursquare), 588 of these were unique people, 186 of the Facebook population "like" this, and 105 photos were added to checkins on Foursquare.

A second examination points qualitatively groups these 100+ photos of the park when checking-in. The diagram shows the following answers to what exactly people are doing when affiliating themselves with the Parc del Clot. The three largest categories represent appreciation of architectural facets of the park. Other categories emerged with photos of play/playgrounds, food/drink and special events.

folksonomist

Found this little artifact on Parc El Clot notes from @gehlarchitects book, How to Study Public Life

folksonomist

A stellar example of urban design of public spaces for public life. Old factory walls frame the park and square, juxtaposing new and old. Bridges zig zag the interior to transcend the park from above, as waterfalls add an auditory feature. #pspl #gehl #urbics (at Parc del Clot)

Chris in Barcelona:

This heatmap shows the areas investigated on the ground to better understand the emissions people emit on social media about their relationship with places and features within spaces. Upcoming places of interest include the Jardins de Rubió i Lluch, Placa Reial, and the Encants Barcelona Market Hall. This is in addition to two of Gehl Architects' selections for squares in their Public Space Public Life (PSPL) surveys: Placa del Sol and Parc del Clot.

The second photo from a field notes diary entry shows an attempt to make observations similar to those in Gehl Architects' methodology book.

Chris: If Twitter is the new town square then we will seek to geolocate online interactions with and within the built environment. I'll be posting this week from Barcelona to investigate the new town square as it exists on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Foursquare.

folksonomist

urbic

Chris at UN City:

Helped the UN City with the challenge of #placemaking on social media as a part of their workshop for their new headquarters that houses 8 UN agencies in a remote part of the harbor.

Social Media Campaign Workshop at UN City in Copenhagen #smwUNcampaign @SMWCPH (at UN CITY Copenhagen)

folksonomist

Goodbye Winter - #Sunsetting the cold winter, and here's to warmer walks along the lakes. (at Søerne)

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