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    The You-City: Technology, Experience and Life on the Ground
    The You-City: Technology, Experience and Life on the Ground
    The You-City: Technology, Experience and Life on the Ground
    Ebook74 pages1 hour

    The You-City: Technology, Experience and Life on the Ground

    By Jeff Ferzoco

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A design sketch in the form of a personal essay, THE YOU-CITY explores the near-future of American urban environments.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOutpost19
    Release dateMay 1, 2012
    ISBN9781937402198
    The You-City: Technology, Experience and Life on the Ground

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      Book preview

      The You-City - Jeff Ferzoco

      The You-City:

      Technology, Experience

      & Life on the Ground

      by Jeff Ferzoco

      copyright 2012

      Jeff Ferzoco

      All rights reserved

      published by

      Outpost19 | San Francisco

      ISBN: 978-1-937402-19-8

      Cover design by

      Jeff Ferzoco

      About the author

      Jeff Ferzoco is a cartography, tech and design geek who likes mapping, information design, illustration, games and user experience. He lives in New York and loves it.

      Day-to-day, Jeff works as the Creative and Technology Director at Regional Plan Association, the nation's oldest independent metropolitan planning organization. His technology perspectives have been published in Planning magazine, Traffic Technology magazine and across the internet.

      Before landing on the East Coast, Jeff also worked as Information Designer at San Francisco's Reineck and Reineck, creating mapping and information for Sunset magazine, the San Francisco Board of Realtors and Bay Area Rapid Transit. His work has been used to help California commuters in Modesto, San Luis Obispo, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

      Jeff studied design with an emphasis in geography and information at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. On occasion, he may be found playing city-building games until the wee hours of the morning.

      To Lou Laurita,

      who painted because he had to.

      The You-City:

      Technology, Experience

      & Life on the Ground 

      At the front door.

      On the street.

      At the corner.

      Around the neighborhood.

      Across the city.

      Back home.

      At the front door.

      It’s a sunny day sometime in the near future, and the threshold of your front door is indeed glowing. It’s blue, which tells you to take the car. It could’ve been green to tell you to take a bike, or yellow for the train, as it has before. A red glow could tell you to stay home and turn on an emergency station or your video conference camera. But it’s giving you a clear signal - one out of many - and you trust it because the system is one you have helped develop and customized yourself. It’s taken your calendar, the decisions of your neighbors, your mood, the predicted temperature and a hundred other factors into account, and it’s confidently telling you to take the car. Just for further transparency, it gives you the ultimate reason: everyone else is going to the beach today.

      You look north. The car assigned to you is glowing the same blue as the threshold. Simple as that. Begin your day.

      We are seeing a shift in the way we interact with our world – and with how the world interacts with us. The places and things most familiar to us are soon to have a lot more depth and meaning, far beyond the sticky, little molecules from which they are made. We've been moving into more human/machine experiences since the first glimmers of computing. It scares a lot of people. Some run for the hills. But there are lots of ways to hold onto our humanity even as we live closer to technology. We can still enjoy analog activities and mix them with new, modern ones. Now, finally, you can see how your ficus is doing through Twitter. Or instantly know when a friend is down the street.

      The things and spaces you interact with are about to get really chatty too, rich with the awkwardness and unpredictability of human/human interactions. We are, after all, the ones making the machines, so logically we will make them a lot like us. As humans, we like direct experience and interaction. We also like environments that communicate and creative tools that augment our humanity. More and more, we’re looking at the ways we’ve interacted before, then identifying specific needs and creating designs that better integrate to who we are as human beings. When do my coworkers typically stop pushing me? When does my mom finally give up? When can technology do something better than we can? And when does it get too complicated or messy? Once we better understand our inner programming, we can pinpoint the signs and symbols we respond to naturally. Then we can use already existing behaviors to make life better and easier.

      The deepening of the human/machine relationship is a long time coming. Popular Science has been prophesying our mechanization for almost a century - and yet a lot of us still have trust issues. It’s easy to imagine our everyday tools thinking and acting for us, and for many, that’s still a frightening idea. They might take over, boss us around, and end with a robot apocalypse and enslavement for eternity. Minority Report and The Matrix have made a lot of people a lot of money off of fears just like that. The same small uncertainty is there every time you walk in a room and a sensor makes the light come on. Or consider The Clapper. It has a machine interface we hadn’t seen before, and because it seemed so odd, so laughably strange, we switched the channel and rejected it – except for grandpa, who genuinely needed it. Or think about when you do an uncannily accurate Google search. There’s a quick flash to a future where the tools change too fast (as they may be RIGHT NOW!). It’s totally unsettling. A sign that we aren’t ready to let go yet, that we still need our old, tactile analog experiences – no matter how inefficient and resource-intensive. Maybe you still prefer a real newspaper with your morning coffee. Maybe you still take handwritten notes in paper notebooks. Activities like these are still loaded with meaning - connected to the way we do things already and to the physical materials of the world.

      So we have an inner conflict. We want change for the better, but we also like things just the way they are. When the changes finally get stark enough, we notice and adapt. But, man, is it a struggle to get us there. That probably comes not from how we approach the machines we use,

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