My apologies if this sounded like I was challenging Jared Diamond to a wordoff ;-)   <a href=“http://idlebritishcolumbian.blogspot.com/ target=“_blank”>Michele just pointed me to wonderfully candid article

explaining why office workers should appreciate their surroundings and pity the poor fools that consider the coffee shop their workplace. While I number amongst those blighted souls and blogged last year on why I like the mobile life, Sathnam Sanghera’s ode to office bliss, raises some notable and worthy points.
I was particularly struck by Sanghera’s anecdotal reference to people working at home starting to form groups so they can work at home together. Man is indeed a social animal. I like working in a public space, even if I am not interacting directly with other people. I like having them around. By that I don’t mean to objectify others by any means, as having people in your immediate proximity can often run counter to productivity. But, everyone has their own levels of tolerance, and I sense that Sanghera is accepting this broad stratum of individual workspace demands. He highlights a study by Benjamin Markham¹ that underlines the fact that workplaces end up being counterproductive by being too quiet. The silence itself becomes a distraction.
This Regus Business Lounge of which he speaks conjures up images of a modernized London men’s club catering to the mobile worker. Probably similarly intentioned as co-operative workspaces, such as the ones I spoke of in the other post, but with more of a traveler’s business lounge feeling. This would certainly speak to why he found it far too quiet to embrace productivity. I am still struggling to identify this milieu factor. The transiency of the Regus Lounge suggests that there is little or no chance of happenstantial interchange…nor is it desired. As a place becomes habitually more familiar, the chance of actually developing a nodding acquaintance certainly can threaten the anonymity of the mobile workplace. It’s a fine line.
Sanghera’s article is a fun one. Well written and I find myself reminded of the fact that I am trying to create my own specialized office workspace on the road. It’s not that it’s better than the office, but I suspect that like Sanghera, I too have social needs and discipline is part of the mix that gets me out of bed in the morning…if I could just stay there and accomplish my workaday routines, the scary reality is that I just might.

BTW, true to form, I am sitting in the Starbuck’s cafe in the centre of the larger Indigo bookstore as a I write this and have just finished writing 1000 words towards my dissertation on a Saturday²

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1. Sorry, but I can’t find the source for his reference
2. By the way, the photo up top comes from a USA today article that explores the third space and the rarpidly growing mobile workforce.

Eamonn pointed me to press release on a rather jarring new TV channel offering in Germany. Etos TV Mourning Channel is a 24/7 broadcast of video obituaries, short videos of the deceased as well as documentaries on cemeteries and on funeral practise. My first reaction was one of amazement — one that a broadcaster would propose such a channel and two that anyone could be expected to tune in. Although, not something I would expect to find myself watching, on reflection, there is much more to this story.

The presentation of the proposal is very respectful. The channel is for commemoration of lives, accomplishments and contributions. There is an apparent trend in Germany for anonymous burial and although the producers admit the obvious commercial motivation, they suggest that this channel can fulfill a real social need. There is an avoidance of even talking about death, clearly something that the funeral industry has had to combat in many cultures.

The idea to combat a taboo by turning it into spectacle seems rather teutonic to me. Rather a black and white binary approach to things. What I am reminded of is that there are some huge cultural issues surrounding death, passing and remembrance. There’s a strange negotiation between those attempting to quietly fade away and those that think it right and proper to ‘force’ passing into the public eye.

This is not an inexpensive service. Simple placement of a picture and text on the network is in the region of 2000 euro, with video presentation for a higher fee. Nonetheless, this is probably commensurate with the magnitude of fees surrounding the funereal panoply.

Nonetheless, this may well be a rather academic approach to read too much into this. Maybe this is merely a publicity ploy. But I return to one of my original questions: who would tune in and watch this? It’s one thing to want to read the obits to see if there are known names showing up, quite another to watch without the intention of making connections. Do people want to make connections with people outside of life? This is an interesting form of ‘entertainment.’ — but then there are stranger ones — the ambulance chasing cameramen of Japan leap to mind.

It will be intriguing to see how this channel fares.

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Social Network/ing Week at the University of Toronto kicked off tonight with a fascinating keynote by Cornell’s Jon Kleinberg. ‘The Geography of Social and Information Networks,’ was one of the most fascinating applied mathematical lectures I can say to having ever attended (and before I go too far I will stress that the math was made very, very approachable for a layperson such as myself). His introducer indicated that he invented algorithmic sociology and although this sounded rather presumptuous (an Al Gore and the Internet sort of thing?), I can’t help but be quite willing to give this some credence after listening to this presentation.
Kleinberg opened with a quote from Jim Gray, that “the emergence of cyberspace and the world wide web was like the discovery of a new continent.” Kleinberg was quite deliberate in this juxtaposition of the geographic with the technological and he then teased this into a further merge with the social. But he questioned whether maps are actually an appropriate metaphor for something as aphysical as social networks — but chose to let this stand on the need to have some common vocabulary with which to be able to relate.

Kleinberg considered the evolution from Milgram’s Small World Experiment of 1968, through the more recent Watts and Strogatz’s work with the MSN network which attempted a more algorithmic approach, but largely substantiated the earlier work. Kleinberg’s own work with LiveJournal attempted to introduce less randomness to the hypothesis and move away from simple closeness to a ranked approach that has applications to the spread of epidemics.

The real meat of the talk was in the conclusion (and I think that this has now been thrown out there for the rest of the conference to further discuss). No one is questioning that social networks exist and have existed throughout time. Nor are we questioning that technologies have enabled new and potentially more effective forms of communication. What is really quite stunning, and paradigm-shifting is that these networks are now made visible. He quoted himself from an interview in the Globe and Mail in which he claimed that “MySpace is awkward because it makes visible the invisible. It makes public what should be private. It doesn’t just create social networks, it anatomizes them and spreads them out like a digestive track on the autopsy table so that you can see what is connected to what and who is connected to whom.” And this is where I suddenly clued in. The network isn’t new, but the fact that it is now made visible and that this can then have impact on how it is constructed and functions is radically new. The network then becomes the object and self-reflective. Soon he posits, software will know more about you then you know about yourself and not only does this demand a need for better computational models to analyse the network, but more importantly we will learn a lot more about large populations and about individual behaviour raising huge concerns about institutionalized lack of privacy.

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Bill Turkel posted another great thought piece today on the Importance of Infrastructure. This post is, as his others always are, very erudite, well phrased and provoke one to think. In this case, his framing question seems to be whether one can really environmentally engineer innovation. His post suggests that letting the right people play in the right sandbox, with the right toys can yield astonishing results. He addresses the nature of how we construct personal space in order to bolster productivity, creativity and all those good things.

Ironically, I just finished browsing past an RSS feeds suggesting the close connection between clutter and depression. Turkel’s article is a raises the question of surroundings to a higher level though. He invokes Christopher Alexander, the guru of environmental design reasoning, and concludes that “the right infrastructure attracts the right people and then something really cool happens. But it isn’t possible to predict in more detail than that.” Thus, the Alexander principle of taking patterns and iteratively exploding patterns into smaller patterns, stops at some level of granularity. The challenge that he identifies is that creation of theses spaces often demands some prediction of the outcome to capture the appropriate resources.

One thing that struck me about this discussion was that my physical environment is very heavily dependent upon and increasingly augmented today by a virtual environment. Moreover, many of the folk trying to use patterns to create the best work environment have to be aware of these ties to the virtual worlds when creating the physical sandbox. Moreover, there is an intriguing connection between how one translates the ideal real world environment into a compelling and useful online existence. There’s a necessary translation between the physical and the virtual, but there is a clear connection, that if we can better appreciate, might also catalyze results.

The second arise from the fact that I am one of those that Turkel identifies as finding the coffee shop the most appropriate environment for work. I blogged on this earlier and attempted to get to this concept of the technologically augmented workspace in a public place. When I started using coffee shops to work in I was still drawn back to the home office for things like net access and other wired media. Increasingly what I can do in a public space has become more pervasive. This however has changed the nature of the cafe environment itself. Inadvertently it was a refuge from the net — now it is invaded by the net and it takes discipline to tear oneself away. Everything is fluid and workspaces have to be too.

I recall when we were working with a designer on our space for Ardesic, we were attempting to create an adaptable and accidental space that people were able to turn into one that suited their needs and the needs of the company. We tried to provide versatile function with whiteboards on odd surfaces and whiteboards on wheels and walls that moved and desk areas based on a metaphorical hug. None of this really worked. I test drove furniture at Herman Miller’s luscious showroom in Toronto and came away convinced that much of this stuff would work, but when it was translated into another space and tried to fulfill others demand, there was a mixed bag of success and absolute failure. Ultimately, although we recognize the need for personal and personalized space, its tough to harmonize this with semi-public space.

I guess I am starting to stray from Bill’s point about infrastructure before innovation, but decided that a tangent about the translation between the physical and the virtual environment is worth consider, given that project infrastructures are increasingly trying to blend the physical with the virtual to reach their objectives.

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It’s always amusing and often telling to compare where we are now to where we thought we’d be. Whether through sci-fi novels, advertisements for the house of the future, or in this case prints from an exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (bnf), facets of the futurethink can provide a particularly prismatic view of past preoccupations. Paleo-Future Blog has a nice collection of images of life in the year 2000 from the BnF. Natalie has weighed in on how prescient these illustrations actually are.
One thing that springs to my attention is the sense that the future was going to free us from contact with the ground. Flight seems to make so much more possible. In a positive way, with long-distance cruise air-ships, our own personal flying vehicles, or apparatus enabling firemen to fight fires from the air and rescue those in distress. Realistically, the artist also recognizes the need for aerial police to maintain order in the newly crowded sky.
The complex is simplified through magical machines, whether the tailor who has a fully automated measuring machine that feeds dimensions to a second machine that takes fabric and turns out fully finished customized garments, or the barber who simply provides commentary as he manipulates a mechanical variant that cuts several patrons hair simultaneously.
The view of school is very interesting, raw materials (books) are committed to a sausage grinder, where they are transformed into impulses and transmitted directly to learning caps on the heads of the students. (The unfortunate child who has to power the machine raises the question of who he is representing, being denied this pablumized knowledge). Are the books consumed by the process…they don’t seem to be emerging.
Is the architect directly carrying out the construction process a telling comment on the efficiency (and contribution) of the French labourer? Yet, the architect works from a plan, simply punching instructions into console, not merely crafting directly from inspiration.
In all these images, the middle layer of intermediaries seem to be removed. Trades are eliminated through mechanization, but servitude is not. Professionals are empowered by progress, but are those eliminated raised up or cast down, or simply allowed a life of leisure able to indulge in endless frivolity such as the festival of the roses?
Questions aside, these visions suggest some of the problems that the artist perhaps saw as significant enough to warrant rectification.
The firemen with wings seem to speak to a fear of building heights and conflagration.
I am not sure of why, but strolling is expected, but otherwise having to walk is not acceptable. Thus, innovation such as powered skates if one has to mingle in the groundbound milieu. However, optimally streets have become a pedestrian only zone, as mechanized transport has moves to the air. Is this a comment on the initial results of the commingling of the mechanized and the pedestrian. The horse is missing from all pictures, except where it is seen purely as a curiosity.
War has become very automated, and especially mobile, yet, the same French politicians of the time go on to construct the Mobile war…and yet the Maginot line springs from this same era.
There is clearly a sense that communication and transportation will enable and that the then current pace stands in society’s way. More, faster, farther all seem to be demonstrated, but then these are the common hopes and expectations of society’s from early times. Its the other comments that can tell us much about the zeitgeist of 1910.
Check out the full exhibition as I have only chosen a few choice images.

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One of the most fascinating stores in Paris and well worth a visit is Colette. The location is prime - along rue Saint-Honoré near the Place du Marche Saint-Honoré. Colette carries a wonderfully eclectic inventory of things amazing. catering to a diverse clientèle from the curious, the tourist to the glitteratti, the hand-picked items in store are displayed creatively and offer the finest of the trendiest. The three storey store can entertain the shopper for an hour or two and also offers a fashionable cafe at which to be seen. The main floor offers cool electronic devices, choice CDs (and LPS), books, jewelry, and all manner of lifestyle accessories. A specialized boutique offers an apothecarial approach and designs custom fragrances for clientèle. Upstairs, the fashion shop has the ambiance of a fine gallery, with outfits and ensembles displayed in situ. There are all manner of sensory pleasures at Colette and its the sort of place where you want to touch, feel, listen, smell, in short a full sensory experience. In an environment of extended creativity, you can lose yourself and if you aren’t careful a wee bit of change. I look forward to a return visit soon.
BTW, the website is as funky as the store. Its stylish Paris.

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There is a great discussion at Bricoleurbanism on the absence of people-scaled spaces in Toronto’s urban streetscape. The discussion takes as a starting point construction hoarding on two sides of the street near Bloor that inadvertently created a humane street scale not unlike that found elsewhere in the world. This contrast in city scale is evident even between Toronto and Montreal. The urban core in Montreal, despite the presence of modern high-rises, and not entirely due to semi-random occurrence of buildings from the past 300 years, has this more human scale. Why? Proportions. The article at Bricoleurbanism offers a brief look at examples in Toronto that have achieved this scale and ends with a call for attention to the dehumanizing scale of our modern city. The infrastructure that allows machines ready access to and from the core also dehumanizes the space and creates the need to actually move to and from the core. When spaces are achieved they are like pearls in the streetscape and there clearly is the intention at times to create these spaces. I include some photos from New Dundee square, the sculpture park between King and Adelaide and the pleasant walk near the Dominion marketplace on Front Street.

This need for humanizing our urban spaces isn’t a new message, but it certainly does reinforce one of the causes behind the familiar scene of streams of workers fleeing the inner city in Toronto on the Go Train every evening rather than lingering in a concrete jungle.

By the way, there is also a companion set of photos from the new Michael Lee-Chin crystal at the ROM, so that those of us unable to attend the public unveiling recently can vicariously appreciate the new space.

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A great online historical tour of the University of Guelph campus is now available. It doesn’t feature whizzbang flash effects or implement AJAX functionality. Instead, it delivers a smooth and effective tour in a simple and compelling fashion with simple html. It’s pleasingly lo-tech, well executed and a great example of matching technology to needs.
I stumbled onto the link when I was adding the UofG RSS feed to my reader this morning. It’s an obscure link on the University of Guelph website and easily missed, which is my biggest criticism of the implementation. The University should make a bigger deal about their ability to provide a virtual experience of one of the finest University campuses in Canada. The other criticism is that when ‘taking’ the tour there are no credits given for who contributed to the project. It’s a great implementation and initiative and I for one would like to know and applaud those who made it possible. I did a quick search and discovered short stories in back issues of the alumni magazine (I get one of these, but missed the story last year) and in the weekly official newspaper at Guelph. The project apparently stems from the passion of a Guelph alumnus in chemistry, Martin Bosch. He spearheaded the placement of a series of historical plaques around campus and clearly he or someone else felt an accompanying web tour would complement the project. This tour is well overdue. I think this is a great project and superb execution, I only wish that the creators had greater acknowledgment and that the university was making a bigger deal about it.

This of course got me thinking about how other universities celebrate their heritage. The immediate sense is that they celebrate it by constantly canvassing donors and university history focuses on alumni. This is not to say that this is not an absolutely essential exercise, but I wonder about what role institutional heritage plays in the minds of students, both current and potential. How well does the school market itself to its existing and future clients (apologies for those that don’t like the commercial usage, but I couldn’t use the ever increasingly popular ‘stakeholders’).
A quick canvas of Canadian university websites reveals that remembering campus heritage is a mixed bag. No surprise there.
University of Victoria: Features a nice photomontage. I personally love aerial shots and watching the evolution of a plan into reality is fascinating, but I am struck by the lack of people in the story and the broad scale of the perspective.
The University of British Columbia has a goodly collection of online histories. They have collected these into a list. Unfortunately, with this there is a lack of cohesion. You can wander off and explore things at your leisure, but its three levels below the main web level. Again, rather removed from mainstream university culture. But hey, I didn’t know that UBC is just a branch campus of McGill ;-)
Interestingly, the University of Alberta, has collected a series of articles from their alumni magazine into a comprehensive history of the school. They combine a look at the campus and its buildings and the actual founders of the school. Its about the third level down again, but once you find the link and work down you are presented with a thoughtful site.
The University of Calgary advertises that ‘this is now.’ Well, they seem to live up to their slogan. I’m still looking to find out where they celebrate their heritage. I guess the focus is on the future. Searching did uncover a 12 page supplement to their yearbook from the recent past in which the creators lament that the institution does not promote its history more. I sense that this call went unheeded.
The University of Saskatchewan has a short and terse official history page, but promisingly they do point to the prospective students page for promised virtual tours. They are three Quicktime VR panoramas here. Well, at least they are in the prospective area, but they are focusing on current lifestyle as opposed to a sense of embedding the present in the past. I do find this a little ironic given that the banner on every page on the site is currently trumpeting the 100 year anniversary of the institution.
The University of Regina seems to pull a single short page from their undergrad calendar. That’s it. No pictures, no romance copy.
I’ll continue the tour and analysis a little later…stayed tuned for part II

There is a pattern forming here. Many institutions are getting on board and providing neat little glitzy Quicktime (generally) tours of a couple choice spots on campus for prospective students. Some provide good archival research documenting their heritage (usually directed towards alumni — we do need to maintain the connection), but there is a huge divide between these two exercises. I guess that’s why I was so taken to see the Guelph effort. Maybe that’s not how students today are shopping for an institution. Maybe that’s now how students at an institution today sense their place in the larger scheme of things.

Forward thinking is great, but what about a sense of where one sits both spatially and temporally?

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I have long wanted to jot down some thoughts about some of my favourite places in Paris. Meaning to eventually present these as an appropriately georeferenced set with appropriate navigation, for now I thought I would add them as simply blog entries. When I thought about where to start, it took me all of a second to ecide to begin with one of my absolutely favourite spots: The Luxembourg Gardens.

There are a plethora of wonderful gardens in Paris, but the Luxembourg is a favourite for a variety of great reasons:

• Convenient
• Adjacent
• Sustantial
• Gorgeous
• Clean
• Safe

The gardens and the Palais de Luxembourg date the seventeenth century and the construction of the palace and surroundings for Marie de Medici. The garden is surrounded by a wall and the garden/park itself is intersected by pedestrian avenues or crushed stone. It is centred on a fountain/large grassy area (I can’t remember which guise it is in right now). There are polite city forests and wonderful statuary surrounding the main promenades.

What I like most particularly about the gardens are the wonderful seats. They can be dragged to any place one desires and come in three flavours. There are the standard upright, like a standard chair type (really great in combination with others for your feet), slightly reclined ones and the best: full reclined spacious metal lounges that are not unlike a Parisian version of an Adirondack deck chair. Getting to the garden early enough means you get your pick of both chair and spot and you can find a wonderfully sheltered spot close to the wall around the central water, and spend the day reading, writing and simply taking in the ambiance of this very special environment.
The central ‘plaza’ area always had this wonderful, huge wading pool in which children rented little sailing boats and pushed them about. Just a really nice ‘park’ kind of thing to do. However, if I am to believe Google Maps (after the Katrina thing I am ever so slightly skeptical), it looks as though this area has been filled in and is just a grassy area now. Maybe its a seasonal, annual thing…I sure hope that is the case.
The area around the Luxembourg also makes it superbly situated. In the Latin Quarter, near the Sorbonne and the Pantheon, it is also near the entrance to the Catacombs (about them in a further entry). There are all sort of wonderful eating opportunities in the area, many of which re great takeaway food that you can return to the park with. I really like this little Japanese yakatori place, a three minute walk from my seat in the park.
On a more somber note, the wall to the northeast is the site where Marshall Michel Ney (the Bravest of the Brave) was executed in 1815 for his part in Napoleon’s return to power. This tragedy is not without its controversy, both due to the circumstances of Ney’s court martial as well as the persistent rumours that he was able to escape to the United States following Napoleon’s second abdication and lived out his days as a rural school master.
The Luxembourg Gardens are easily accessed, both by foot walking south from the Seine having crossed the Pont Neuf, or via the Luxembourg Metro station which deposits you right at the northeast gate of the park.

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In my research into nineteenth century Canadian drinking habits, I very quickly learned that the temperance folks had a special enmity for the custom of treating. The crusade against this special social practise informed much of the pamphleteering and petitioning of legislative bodies. You can see the threat: if you have a lot of friends, and the members of group want to maintain the respect of their peers, the rounds just keep on coming. It was often the exuberant nature of the bar that so threatened the well being of the average Canadian. The warm surrounds of the tavern, the good company of friends and the intellectualizing influence of alcohol. The temperance folks figured that they might be able to somehow beat this custom out of Canadian bar behaviour. There are however some customs that simply do perpetuate and certainly treating is one of them.

So lets take that into the internet age…not constrained by the need to be physically present, the Frog Pub chain has introduced TextToPint. You can now purchase a round for your friends online. Its pretty simple. You pay for the round online and are provided with a simple code that can be text’d to your buddies and they can redeem it from their ‘genial host.’ Brilliant. Good for the pub. What will the temperance folks say???

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