Archive for the 'seattle' Tag

My Favorite Talks from Ignite Seattle 6

Over the past couple years, I’ve attended a few events hosted by various members of the Seattle tech community. Most of them are focused on running and promoting startup companies, but last month I had the chance to attend one that was purely centered around encouraging creative expression: Ignite Seattle.

If you aren’t familiar with Ignite, it’s a series of talks which are 5 minutes presentations, each with 20 auto-advancing slides. People are free to talk about whatever they want, since the goal is simply to share exciting and entertaining ideas with the community. Here’s a meta-talk by Scott Berkun about the format:

I could fill this space with more uninteresting text. Instead, I’m going to share some of the talks I enjoyed. Have fun watching, and hopefully you’ll quickly see why you should come along with me to the next Ignite, whenever that may be.

May 22, 2009 | 3 comments | tags: , ,

The Informational City

In Understanding Amsterdam, Manuel Castells discusses the change of urban structure in response to the advancement information technology, claiming that “the coming of a technological revolution centered on information technologies, the formation of a global economy, the transition to a new society, that [...] replaces the industrial society as the framework of social institutions.”

Seattle is probably a good example of a city currently undergoing that shift. As a city that began with the goal of becoming a great trading port, and rose to that status through an economy focused on lumber and shipbuilding, it has become a place where people “come for the jobs at cutting-edge companies such as Microsoft and Amgen” and thus the best-educated city in the United States.

As Castells outlines, this change has significant consequences on the urban structure of a city. Corporations such as Microsoft are well suited creating their own world in the suburbs, given that they need relatively little face-to-face business interaction with entities in Seattle. At the same time, many of the well-paid employees at these companies are moving downtown, leading to the rapid development of condos, coffeeshops, and restaurants.

If this shift to an “informational city” is in fact reshaping the urban and suburban areas of our cities to serve the wants and needs of the upper middle class, our society needs to answer the question of how it will serve those who aren’t educated and/or rich.

April 18, 2007 | no comments | tags: , , , ,

The Olympic Sculpture Park


Get out now. Not just outside, but beyond the rap of the programmed electronic age so gently closing around so many people at the end of our century. Go outside, move deliberately, then relax, slow down, and look around. Do not jog. Do not run…Walk. Stroll. Saunter…Explore.

Heeding the words of John Stilgoe in Outside Lies Magic, a few of us went to the Seattle Art Museum’s relatively new Olympic Sculpture Park yesterday morning to make observations regarding wayfinding in urban spaces, in order to help us develop a question for research in Amsterdam.

I found the park to be an incredible use of what was just recently an industrial wasteland. The layout of the park gently guides one along a Z-shaped walkway, providing many opportunities for one to saunter off into auxiliary paths and alcoves without letting visitors forget that they are in a museum. Impressively, the park integrates itself into its surroundings, crossing over Elliot Avenue and the BNSF railway, and landing at the shoreline of Elliot Bay.

The morning’s slow pace allowed us to “read the city” and make many observations, especially about the rapid proliferation of condo buildings throughout downtown Seattle, and the effects that such construction has upon the city’s storied history, both physically and socially.

On a somewhat unrelated note, at some point in this discussion, the topic came up that cellphone conversations almost always begin with the caller stating their current location. If you think about it, it’s true – the context of a phone call generally holds a good deal of importance, regardless of the call’s purpose, and a mobile phone does not (visibly) transmit the implicit location information carried by landlines. How long will it take before caller ID includes that contextual information, such as location and maybe even a Twitter status?

April 16, 2007 | no comments | tags: , , ,