Do We Really Want to Live in Scalable City?
CNet’s Dan Terdiman has a great story today on a project at the University of California at San Diego’s Center for Research in Computing and the Arts. The project, Scalable City, seeks to demonstrate the danger of treating human beings as data points, and reminds us that while there may be algorithmic ways to make things more efficient, that’s not the same as making things better.
. . . the multimedia system can rapidly take digital representations of barren landscapes and fill them in with gracefully curved roads and neighborhoods full of new houses. From a macro perspective represented by an aerial view, such designs present what appears to be an efficient maximization of available space [but] at a micro, or surface, level, computer systems can’t know, practically, what environments work for people. Thus, Scalable City demonstrates how an algorithm designed to maximize the development of a previously barren landscape could well result in individual streets so jammed with buildings that few could actually be habitable.
Computer systems can’t know what environments work for people. These will be important words to keep in mind as our tools grow more powerful. Already there’s new and better attention being paid to designing user-friendly interfaces and services, which is not as simple as it sounds. And we’re now starting to see a new set of software tools that design these interfaces and services for us. It sounds obvious, but I think it’s worth reminding developers that usability is something that can only be judged by the user. If we don’t manage to keep this in mind, the tools and services we cook up will be worse than useless, they’ll turn out to be counter-productive.
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Is this supposed to be intelligent comment? I’m a recent visitor to the buzz and burr of cutting edge web hyperbole, but this seems extraordinarily shallow. Either this research was much deeper than reported, in which case it deserved better reporting or it was as written, in which case it should have been thoroughly lambasted. A better example of noise for the sake of the echo I’ve yet to see.
Whew, Neil. I welcome your alternate analysis. But yes, actually, you’re right. A lot of what I’m doing here consists of echoing some of the more interesting things that pop up in the virtual world, 3D, geospatial, metaversal or even 3pointD space. I’d be interested to know your take on the Scalable City project.
What’s freaky about this screenshot here is that it looks *exactly* like Azure Islands in SL, and I mean *so real it’s scary*. Erm…so virtual it’s scary? Fly out and see the roads that Adam Zaius and Nexus Nash built and the way they laid out these cosmos sims…and then people put the houses on about that crowded because people just tend to want more *house*, they’re indoors more than out, their lives are inside in lots of ways so they don’t care what the aerial view looks like.
So, maybe you’re wrong about all this Walker, maybe the machine can calculate how people should live, and in the virtual world, they’ll actually be able to live in that artificial way.
Of course, I quite agree with your point about treating humans as “data points” (*shudders*).
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