Design – Page 23 – Public Intelligence Blog

Communities: the institutions of the 21st century? An interview with Rachel Botsman

Since her influential book about how collaborative consumption is changing the way we live, Rachel Botsman has been a leading actor in the collaborative economy and stimulated important debates about its future. OuiShare Fest Co-chair Francesca spoke to her about her vision of the collaborative economy movement, her current work and what she will bring to OuiShare Fest this May.

A lot has happened since your book “What’s Mine is Yours”. Did you imagine the collaborative economy would look the way it does today? Where do you see the movement going now?

Continue reading “Jean Lievin: Communities: the institutions of the 21st century? An interview with Rachel Botsman”

2014/03/19

Berto Jongman: First Organizational Chart Flows With Function Not Rank

Design

The First Org Chart Ever Made Is a Masterpiece of Data Design

By Liz Stinson

WIRED, 03.18.14

EXTRACT

As the Erie Railway grew, so did the amount of data it had to wrangle: which superintendents were responsible for which set of tracks; schedule changes; who the various conductors, laborers and brakemen worked under. As Caitlin Rosenthal writes over at McKinsey Quarterly, if any one data point was mismanaged it could bring dire results: “One delayed train, for example, could disrupt the progress of many others. And the stakes were high: with engines pulling cars in both directions along a single set of rails, schedule changes risked the deadly crashes that plagued 19th-century railroads.”

This flowery organizational chart was created by Daniel McCallum, the company’s general manager, to efficiently deliver critical information and delegate tasks to the right person. Instead of a top-down structure, the chart flows from its roots like a tree. The power was centralized with the president and board of directors as its anchor, but much of the day-to-day responsibility over the tracks was allocated to lower-level superintendents. The reasoning for this, Rosenthal writes: “They possessed the best operating data, were closer to the action, and thus were best placed to manage the line’s persistent inefficiencies.”

Read full article.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: First Organizational Chart Flows With Function Not Rank”

2014/03/142014/03/14

Jean Lievens: Paracity High Tech Slums as Solution

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Materials, P2P / Panarchy, Resilience

PARACITY

“To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”
– Samuel Beckett

Paracity is a biourban organism that is growing on the principles of Open Form: individual design-build actions generating spontaneous communicative reactions on the surrounding built human environment and this organic constructivist dialog leading into self-organized community structures, development and knowledge building.

The growing organism the Paracity is based on a three dimensional wooden primary structure, organic grid with spatial modules of 6 x 6 x 6 metres (6 meters is approximately 18 feet)constructed out of CLT cross-laminated timber sticks. This simple structure can be modified and grown by the community members working as teams or by an assigned Paracity constructor.

Paracity’s self-sustainable biourban growth is backed up by off-the-grid environmental technology solutions providing methods for water purification, energy production, organic waste treatment, waste water purification and sludge recycling. These modular plug-in components can be adjusted according to the growth of the Paracity and moreover, the whole Paracity is designed not only to treat and circulate its own material streams, but to start leaching waste from its host city becoming a positive urban parasite following the similar kind of symbiosis as in-between slums and the surrounding city. In a sense Paracity is a high-tech slum, which can start tuning the industrial city towards an ecologically more sustainable direction.

Learn more — superb range of photographs and graphics.

2014/03/01

Stephen E. Arnold: OpenText Innovates In File Sync And Share

Data, Design, Education, Innovation, Knowledge, Science, Software

OpenText Innovates In File Sync And Share

OpenText announces its new product: OpenText Tempo. The new file sharing collaboration platform is highlighted in the press release, “Social Collaboration Combined With Secure Files Sync and Share: Introducing OpenText Tempo.” OpenText describes Tempo as a project that required teamwork from all over the world.

OpenText Tempo will be able to:

“…provides an engaging user experience that combines the convenience of secure file sync and share with social collaboration and seamless integration to Content Server. It connects people with each other and with their content in a secure, compliant environment that enables open dialogues to take place, extending the value of content through the process of collaboration.”

It is the company’s first EIM application with integration for other products, including Tempo Note, Tempo Social, and Tempo Box. OpenText also says it improves Web site management, web experience management, and portal applications.

It is a commercially secure file sharing and social platform. Will Dropbox and other free services be able to something similar on at an appealing price point?

Whitney Grace, March 01, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

2014/02/252014/02/25

Patrick Meier: Crisis Mapping without GPS Coordinates

Crowd-Sourcing, Data, Design, Geospatial, Innovation

Crisis Mapping without GPS Coordinates

I recently spoke with a UK start-up that is doing away with GPS coordinates even though their company focuses on geographic information and maps. The start-up, What3Words, has divided the globe into 57 trillion squares and given each of these 3-by-3 meter areas a unique three-word code. Goodbye long postal addresses and cryptic GPS coordinates. Hello planet.inches.most. The start-up also offers a service called OneWord, which allows you to customize a one-word name for any square. In addition, the company has expanded to other languages such as Spanish, Swedish and Russian. They’re now working on including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and others by mid-January 2014. Meanwhile, their API lets anyone build new applications that tap their global map of 57 trillion squares.

When I spoke with CEO Chris Sheldrick, he noted that their very first users were emergency response organizations. One group in Australia, for example, is using What3Words as part of their SMS emergency service. “This will let people identify their homes with just three words, ensuring that emergency vehicles can find them as quickly as possible.” Such an approach provides greater accuracy, which is vital in rural areas. “Our ambulances have a terrible time with street addresses, particularly in The Bush.” Moreover, many places in the world have no addresses at all. So What3Words may also be useful for certain ICT4D projects in addition to crisis mapping. The real key to this service is simplicity, i.e., communicating three words over the phone, via SMS/Twitter or email is far easier (and less error prone) than dictating a postal address or a complicated set of GPS coordinates.

Source with Graphics

2014/02/162014/02/16

Berto Jongman: How visualising data has changed life…and saved lives

Data, Design

How visualising data has changed life… and saved lives

From John Graunt's ‘bills of mortality' to Florence Nightingale's revolutionary ‘rose charts', the distillation of information into graphics has been a vital tool for scientists

Nicola Davis

The Observer, Saturday 15 February 2014

Big data, infographics, visualisations – the pop words of a modern phenomenon. But while information accumulation has become a 21st-century obsession, our generation is not the first to discover that a picture is worth a thousand words, as a new British Library exhibition will reveal.

Revelling in the power of illustrations, tables and figures, Beautiful Science charts the course of data dissemination across the centuries, from the grim ledgers of death recorded by John Graunt in the 17th-century “bills of mortality” to the digital evolutionary tree dreamt up by an Imperial College researcher, complete with a mind-boggling zoomable function. “You can use almost fractal-like patterns to explore all of life on Earth,” says Dr Johanna Kieniewicz, lead exhibition curator.

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2014/02/122014/02/12