My critique into Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent for the Nintendo Wii looks at Morality in games and the use of the interactive capabilities of the Wii console. Download the PDF here.

From the delivery data I collected as a test over the xmas holidays I created a map in Google maps and Google earth of the places I delivered flowers to, what they were (i.e. what emotion the represented) and the message sent with them (where possible). Here is the link to the live Google maps version and here is the link to download the Google Earth KML file

Over the Xmas break I have been helping out my girlfriend in her flower shop. This gave me an ideal opportunity to study how things work and have a think about the possible ‘data’ that I can set free. The original concept of a button to press would not be practical in hindsight as they have always got a handful of flowers! However, the one thing that they use every time they make a sale is their till, and they always hit the ‘cash’ button to open the drawer so this got me thinking about adapting that button for my needs. I could ‘piggy back’ the button to send a signal to signify a sale.

I also made a lot of deliveries for them over the Xmas period, delivering flowers all over the place. I managed to keep a record of all the addresses the I delivered to in the period leading upto Xmas. This has given me a data set to start to work with. Another observation I made was that all the delivery addresses they handle are written down on pieces of paper and attached to the order, this is where I collected my data from. Maybe there is some way of digitising this data set. More thinking…

Below are the comments from my recent presentation of my work. I’m not putting them on here to blow my own trumpet mind…they prove really useful for my further development:

“Eden and the transformative processes are rich. Social, economic and industrial analyses,are useful to understand the different powers that drive the cycles that you identify. Nice idea about forced and organic transformations - external inputs and internal. Good use of the blog to background the work. And good reference back to Foucault. the move to greenfield and brownfield is interesting now and your model of time for your cycles. Although you say that greenfield might be new or fresh but surely this is relative to your time and the apparent beauty of a space. Dartmoor has been preserved at it is now but it used to be a forest before they cut the trees down! but this insist on not reforesting it. So Dartmoor is brownfield really but people treat it as green. Your idea of people making things brown is great though because it says that the model of time is relative to the individual.”

I was thinking on my very soggy walk back from uni earlier about animal tagging of all things! it struck me that there must be a fairly cheap way of tracking animals or object using GPS as I have seen rangers on TV tagging elephants and such like so they can track them on a GPS system and I wondered if this could be applied to my project. I could digitise the fuzzy logic of where particular bouquets of flowers go from my girlfriends shop in order to produce an emotional map of an area. This not only opens up the data to the public domain but also provides some interesting discourse about the emotional gestures that flowers provide and the distance they travel. Hmmm….

Chris and I had an interesting discussion today about my project. We talked about how the project could manifest itself and how to access data from different companies. It was decided that I needed to come up with a company to start working with and try to get data out of in order to make a prototype…it suddenly occurred to me that I could get data from my girlfriends florist shop as a starting point. It would prove interesting to map an aspect of flowers as they are an emotional gesture and could effectively give me a rich data set if I can get at it. The problem I face is that most of the transactions are analogue and as such they don’t have a digital interface that logs orders or stock control so there is no data to get at. There is a networked ordering system by flowersdirect that they use but it is such a large franchise that I cant really foresee getting my hands on the data. A solution that was suggested was to develop a system that can get at the non digital data and digitise it in a way that I could use for the project. Arduino boards were mentioned and I freaked out somewhat but the idea is great and is not beyond my reach…a bit more research methinks!

I was looking at google mars last night. Its a new service from google that maps the surface of Mars in a google earth/maps stylee. They show it with 3 different views elevation, visible and infrared. It is the elevation view that I am most interested in as it uses a contour map of the surafce. This got me thinking about my space project. It would tie in nicely with the greenfield and brownfield theory and would provide some nice visulaisations of the space. Using the colours in the map I culd map the ’stains’ people leave on the space even developing it furtur showing the marks that people have left over a century giving some really rich maps of the space.

I am interested in the Greenfield and Brownfield idea where all space started out as ‘untouched’ land such as agricultural or ‘green’ land and slowly through cycles has evolved into brownfield or previously developed land which has been left to decay. I think this can provide some interesting views on a space, showing a previously invisable historic map of a space where people have left invisible ’stains’ on the land making it brown. I like the idea of using GPS to map the marks people leave on a particular space in real time showing the slow decay of the space facilitated by the ’stains’ or ‘marks’ people leave on the space.

On monday the 3rd Dec 07 Adam, Luke, Simon and I went along to the mscapeFest at the Hewlett Packard research labs in Bristol. Mscape is a beta software package that allows you to put hotspots over certain areas of real space using GPS and a windows mobile based device. This hotspot can then be assigned to trigger an event on the mobile device, be it a sound, image, video etc. They are also currently in the process of including other sensory devices such as RFID, active RF, infrared and barcode recognition for proximity sensing with many others on the cards. The two day event (we only went for the first day) consisted of various workshops outlining the various aspects of Mscape such as pervasive gaming, community building etc along with networking sessions and tonnes of free food! We managed to get some people interested in what we are doing for the games module which is always a bonus. We also got to have a play with some mediascapes (in a ‘here’s one we made earlier’ blue peter stylee) out in Queens Square in Bristol…it was freezing and we managed to find loads of animal noises (it was a mediascape about animals!) but was good to have a go! All in all it proved to be a very interesting day and certainly sparked off some ideas. It has helped me with my ideas for the space module and can also reinforce some key issues with the games module…well worth the trip out!

My mission, if I choose to accept it, is to set previously guarded data free by placing private data back into the public domain. In other words, I want to ‘open source businesses’. I want to get businesses to ‘free up their data’ by means of visualisations to outline what the company does, make awareness to a particular point or just simply involve the public in the development of the company or a particular product. I will have to develop a method of getting data out of companies in such a way that benefits them or interests them in drawing more attention to what they do. Taking the archOS system as an example, the data from the archOS system on water usage is made available, or ‘open sourced’ for the use in visualisations to facilitate awareness to the amount of water that is consumed and used within one building each day. Another example could be Exploratorium’s ‘Cabspotting’ Project where San Francisco’s taxi cabs a traced as they travel through the town using the taxi companies GPS data of the numerous cars’ positions. This data can be considered as the private source code of the company as this is what is used to facilitate the dispatchers in getting a cab successfully to a client. Opening up this data to the public highlights economic, social and cultural trends at the same time as being an advert for the taxi company’s activity.
The idea that releasing source code into the public domain benefits not only the company in its development but also brings a sense of wealth back into the public domain is one that I am keen to make a point of with this project.