Mastering ATL

Promises promises.

2009-02-04T09:27:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I posted something. Which is very bad practice. I still have some semi-amusing anecdotes in the works, but I've largely spent the past few days working on some things in Flex.

While wacked out on cold meds, I was checking out Flowing Data's Walmart Growth Visualization and playing with Modest Maps. I know most of my posts here generally fall into two categories: nonsensical anecdotes or emphatic epiphany. This post qualifies as the latter.

I was beginning to think about creating a map of Atlanta that featured nothing but strip malls. And as a level of granularity, 3 or 4 of the strip malls I've been targeting and visiting could be clicked to follow through as case studies, complete with my brilliant observations about pigeons, urine stenches and subjective perspectives of the city image.

So as a macro view, you would have a city rendered as a collection of one its most complex elements: the shopping node. Everything else would be left to the ether, emphasizing the invisible elements of the city, letting the opacity of ellipses scream through the map. As a micro view, I hope to provide users an idea of how varied and integrated the image of the shopping node (strip mall) is.

Emphatic epiphany indeed. I really like this idea, because until now this project has basically been a bucket of gruel in my head. Every so often I would dig in with a spoon and pull out a tasty chunk. Now, the gruel has been processed into a delicious idea sausage casing. Have I pushed this metaphor too far? Yes. More soon.

On data and discovery

2009-01-16T11:30:00.000-08:00

I had a decently productive week. I conducted field work twice and I'm going to post some anecdotal accounts of those excursions as soon as I can, lots of strange happenings.

While out in the field I had the gigapan panoramic photobot. It's basically a little tripod mounted guy with two motors and a robot finger for snapping photos over a grid. It's pretty neato. I was able to take four panoramas on Tuesday (Jan. 13) and one on Thursday (Jan. 15). Tuesday's panoramas are stitched and uploaded. Check out the dead strip mall, Belvedere Plaza, Midtown Promenade 1 and Midtown Promenade 2.

Being out in the field got me thinking about the elusive quality of this project's data. The experiential stuff, which I'll post later, involves men of god, Crunk Clubs, and shopping for guava jelly. That's all well and good, but I've got a masters project that needs doing!

What I've mostly been getting are interesting observations when I sit down with the photos and start tracing aerial maps of strip malls. I do the latter exercise to break the strip malls down into abstract blocks and lines. I spoke of Lynch's elements as a lens for exploration in the previous post and it's been interesting to see what aspects of strip malls take on the elements seamlessly and what aspects require some shoehorning.

What I'm finding, from my design work and experiential accounts, is that elemental qualities of strip malls are variable. To clarify, strip malls take on different images from different perspectives.

The pedestrian experience is markedly different than the motorist experience. Yet the motorist inevitably becomes a pedestrian at some point. The motorist/pedestrian dichotomy is one tension worth exploring. For the motorist parking lanes can quickly change from paths to edges depending on the number of parked cars present. This really isn't an issue for someone on foot.

The image of the strip mall is variable among pedestrians. The view from the parking lot is different than that of walking store fronts. There's a sort of macro view/micro view binary.

Nodes, or areas of concentrated qualities or foci which people enter, are present in the form of larger, more popular stores, theaters or restaurants. These can become landmarks for a motorist outside of the strip mall. Alternatively, when they aren't busy, they may simply just be landmarks.

I just needed to get these observations out of my head. I feel that anyone of these is ripe for digital media intervention. Digital media enables transitional views, accommodates multiple perspectives, and can portray phenomena over time. That's a small rebut to the menacing question that closed the last entry.

Theoretical Lens

2009-01-15T08:50:00.000-08:00

With millions of vague ideas coursing through my mind and panic taking hold of me, I met with my advisor, Carl DiSalvo, to discuss ways of actually getting my work done. He suggested, firstly, that I not wig out and, secondly, that I make some definitive decisions. One decision in particular: choose a theoretical model. He suggested either Lynch's Elements of the City or Susan Leigh Star's Ethnography of Infrastructure, and, once decided upon, abstracting it, and applying it to my field work.

It's interesting how themes reemerge within the Digital Media program. A lot of the work I've done in this program returns to one text in particular: Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City. So it's no surprise, when overstimulated, over-read, and wigging out, I found some comfort in returning to Lynch.

Elements of the city image, according to Lynch, are Paths, Edges, Districts, Nodes and Landmarks. Here's an extremely brief delineation of the elements. Lynch also talks about form qualities of the elements, like singularity, dominance, visual scope and continuity, to name a few, and how they inform a Sense of the Whole and the Metropolitan Form.

When I go out to strip malls, when I analyze my experiential notes and look at my pictures, I'm ultimately looking for: elements of the city image within the strip mall; form qualities of these elements; and what, if possible, might be the sense of the whole.

While my panic is temporarily at bay, there is a menacing question that looms: what does this have to do with digital media? While I may be using software to trace and abstract maps of strip malls, I'm still not showing the benefits of doing so nor am I developing a system that employs digital media to effectively convey the image of the city through the lens of a strip mall. And therein lies the real challenge, and relevance, of masters work in Digital Media.

Visualizing Data

2008-12-08T12:49:00.000-08:00

In doing some work for the News Games blog I came across the GoodGuide's Vote With Your Dollars visualization. It's powered by Flare.

Like everything else that I've seen made with Flare, I really like this. Maybe I'm just pleased with the interactive eye candy, the API has lots of sexy transitions, but I could absolutely see something like this as a means for engaging data about strip malls. Any ideas? Any other means of engaging data I should be considering as well as or instead of Flare?

Time Spent in the Field...

2008-12-08T12:32:00.000-08:00

One thing we're talking about in the Public Design Workshop is how to document the time it takes to sense spaces. I think for my project it might be interesting to account for my time spent collecting data comparatively. For instance, while I might spend a few hours picking up data, taking notes, photos, etc., it might be interesting to juxtapose that with the amount of time an individual might spend working, shopping, or eating/drinking in that space and whether there's any overlap.

The difficulty is conveying the social aspect of data collection. It's nice to have pictures and blog posts conveying process, but how can this inform the final project? How can it convey the very real prospect that this is a social activity taking place in the "real" world?

That is all for now.

Approved!

2008-11-20T20:52:00.000-08:00

I should have posted this a week or so ago, but my proposal was approved "as is." You can now download the hugely massive proposal pdf, it's fun and has lots of pictures and colors. Get on it!

The semester is winding down and soon I'll have plenty of time to hang out in strip malls and get some inspiration. Also, I've been reading Iain Borden's Skateboarding, Space and the City. It's pretty great, for lack of a better term, and should really inform the work nicely.

Visual Style Explorations

2008-11-03T06:59:00.000-08:00

I've been messing around with some comps for my proposal and here's what I've come up with...
Landing Page Comp

Main Page Comp

Comparative View Page Comp

So. The aesthetic is a bit periodic table-ish, which I don't know if I want to keep pushing. What is it about Futura that screams chemistry class? All of the little icons are borrowed from Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City.

Strip Mall at Dusk: an evening on Buford Highway

2008-10-20T18:02:00.001-07:00

In need of some serious inspiration, I ran out to Northeast Plaza, a massive strip mall on Buford Highway. In many ways, this spot was the genesis of this project. It's the strip mall I had in mind when I decided to take this direction for my project.

My first trip there was for dinner with some friends from Athens and it struck me as, well, amazing. I noticed the center featured a wealth of restaurants: two Ethiopian, one Bangladeshi, one El Salvadorian, one Peruvian, two Panaderias (Mexican-style bakeries), a Ray's Buffet, a Pizzeria, three "Rey de..." restaurants and a pollo-joint. I'd been back a few times to hit up the Good Will and Super Mercado. There's also an exceptional tacqueria across the street (in the shadow of a Taco Bell).

On this return I noticed one of the Ethiopian spots had closed, but everything else was pretty much as I'd remembered. It's a remarkable kind of place. Lots going on, several night spots – one music club, a pool hall and a bowling alley. It also looks like Rey de Todos (king of everything), could be a great place to throw down on weekends.

This place really does have everything: many clothing stores, two health clinics, a dentist. Not to mention, the grocery store is like a strip mall unto itself, with a restaurant, insurance sales, a bank, a jeweler, a few swag/clothing booths all within it's big box structure. So much seems to happen here on several levels. It's a place where people come to work and play, to purchase the goods that they need from day-to-day and over the long-term.

And it's all about 4 or 5 miles from Midtown Atlanta. The commercial heft and dining options available in this one massive strip led me to question what the differences and similarities are between this spot on Buford Highway and Little Five Points. Can a strip mall be considered a district? Or would this full under the umbrella of Buford Highway's cosmopolitan identity? Can the Buford Highway corridor be considered a district? All things to consider.

Patel Plaza

2008-10-20T17:39:00.001-07:00

Patel Plaza is conveniently located on Church St. in North Decatur. I say "conveniently located," because it's on the way to Your Dekalb Farmer's Market, which is where I head every other week for the best produce around.

Patel Plaza is home to Last Chance Thrift Store – great bargains await on 1/2-price Mondays – as well as several Indian and Pakistani specialty stores. There's a little Wafflehouse tucked away on the side road that runs behind the shopping center to Dekalb Industrial Parkway.

To take a tangent, it's always amazed me how two clashing nationalities, Indian and Pakistani in this instance, can occupy the same spaces in the U.S..

My first exposure to such a phenomenon was in D.C. when I had an Eritrean friend who mingled regularly with Ethiopians while the two countries were at war. It was an interesting dynamic and spending Friday nights with him and his mates showed me how closely intertwined the two nationalities had become states-side.

I was shown the differences between Eritrean and Ethiopian night clubs, cuisine, music and dance moves, but none of these places were ever exclusively Eritrean or Ethiopian and they were generally within close proximity to one another (U Street Corridor or Adams Morgan). The scene was especially electric when the two countries agreed to their final terms of peace in 2003.

The perils of field work, or pigeons be trippin'

2008-10-20T17:13:00.001-07:00

Last Tuesday I went out to run some errands and since most of my errands take place within or close to strip malls, I took my camera. I nabbed the pano above at a shopping center at the northeast corner of the intersection of Lawrenceville Highway and North Druid Hills Road. Usually there's nothing too noteworthy about that shopping center (save the two awesome Indian lunch buffets within), but on this occasion something, uh, magic happened.

I had parked in a distant part of the lot to get a good perspective for taking multiple shots to stitch together. At the moment I opened my car door it was engulfed by pigeons, about twice the amount in the picture above. I popped back in and zipped to another part of the lot, no pigeons were harmed.

I made my way to another spot that I deemed safe for photographing. About half-way through the process, the same flock of pigeons buzzed me a la Top Gun. I was a little freaked out, but managed to get all my shots. Later, when I was getting ready to leave, I saw a minivan zipping through the parking lot headed straight for the flock with its horn blaring.

I then recalled that the huge cavity in the strip mall used to be an Indian super market. Not too remarkable, but I always remembered seeing a lady out there in front of that market throwing massive amounts bird seed out for the pigeons. Now I'm no ornithologist, but I'm pretty sure these pigeons have been conditioned to hang out there and, perhaps, have been trained to attack graduate students who are trying to get some inspiration for their masters project. That and they're probably pissed about malicious minivans... what's left to do than become a renegade pigeon?

Hypothesizin'!

2008-10-14T06:07:00.000-07:00

I was in Philadelphia over the weekend visiting with my friend and former colleague Jasper Sluijs. It was an excellent opportunity to get away from things for a while, but, with Jasper's help, it was also an excellent opportunity to tease a hypothesis out of my concept.

Being from the DC-area I have a very strong mental image of what a city is, or should be, and living in the south (Austin, TX and then Atlanta, GA) has really challenged and expanded that image. I'm also a product of the Maryland suburbs and have, or had, an ingrained notion of what strip malls were: their basic function, appearance, etc.

So, sitting street-side in South Philadelphia, sipping on a Yuengling after a long walk around the city, Jasper and I started to talk about narrowing my focus for this project. Although it sounds like fun, it's simply not enough to cruise around and snap shots of strip malls and say: these are cultural centers with levels of expressiveness heretofore unexplored. That would be easy.

Together we surmised that this project needs a solid hypothesis and we started thinking about city codes and planning. And there's something in that: perhaps due to lack of, or overabundance of, city planning ordinance, strip malls have become cultural centers in Atlanta. This is a relationship that should be relatively easy to suss out. For instance, the coding that allows for an occult shop to operate on a block in South Philly would in Atlanta allow it to operate in a strip mall off of a highway.

Does city planning place constraints upon or facilitate cultural commerce? To take this a step further, I also plan to investigate how these constraints could be/should be represented in a digital environment. I am open to any suggestions that may help refine or refute this train of thought: so holla in the comments!

Working Scenarios

2008-09-30T08:19:00.001-07:00

Scene 1
Ron is a poet. He finds his music in the mundane. Unfortunately he's also a full-time bartender and he can't get out to find his everyday muse in his banal surrounds. Confined to the internet he stumbles upon the Strip Mall Ethnography. He muses on the significance of having two Ethiopian restaurants, a Mexican grocery and a Dollar Store in one place. He sees the negative capability inherent in the shopping center experience. He decides to write his suburban-inspired epic and return to school to get his MFA.

Scene 2
Shannon works for the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. She's been looking for ways to express the vibrant, cosmopolitan nature of certain areas around Atlanta to young, well-educated, affluent profesionals looking to move to Atlanta, but Google Maps shows her city as a mass of push-pins and strip malls. To make matters worse, Everyblock has started showing tons of crime data around fledgling areas of commerce.

Shannon wants people to understand that there's more to Atlanta than crime data and push-pins, that strip malls are not commodified culture, but sites of culture and diversity in earnest. She's suggested that Strip Mall Ethnography be added to the CoC's web-site to give a more accurate portrayal of what Atlanta's shopping landscape has to offer.

Scene 3
Tom is a worker's rights activist. He wants to find an ideal setting for staging a statement of resistance in a public setting. By engaging the Strip Mall Ethnography he discovers that day laborers congregate at a strip mall a mere three miles from one of the poshest strip malls in Atlanta. Through some organizing and coaxing, he manages to convince two dozen workers to congregate at the posh shopping center for a week. By Friday he has generated media coverage and brought attention to the unfair working conditions many day laborers are subjected to in one of Atlanta's most affluent neighborhoods.

Scene 4
Alastair is a cultural critic and PhD candidate in England. He's convinced, thanks to reading too much Baudrillard, that America is series of cookie-cutter culture blocks, conveniently situated along endless miles of black-top. He sees the seemingly endless, homogenous listings for Targets and Wal-Marts as prime evidence to support his thesis: American culture is dead.

Alastair's rival, Frank, contends that American culture is still a vital and influential force in the world. That strip malls may seem like vapid, mass produced outlets of goods and ideas, but they are in fact complex parts of a larger system that inform potent individual landscapes.

The two create a lively discourse over Strip Mall Ethnography. Frank posits that the trends that come to the fore within the documentation show strip malls to be robust and culturally diverse sites. Alastair counters that these "sites" are ultimately subject to the politics of ownership and can therefore be considered only as points of sale for the commodified culture defined by corporate information brokers. Frank then rebuts, with the help of Strip Mall Ethnography, that while buying and selling may be the exigence for the a strip mall's existence, more than commerce takes place at a strip mall. They are, indeed sites of possible resistence and difference.

Scene 5
Carol is a high school teacher. She's been excited to work with the Center for Urban Pedagogy, but she wants her students to make something other than a video documentary or print campaign. She's been checking out the Strip Mall Ethnography and wants her students to take the Bronx Bodega Project a step further, turning the data used in the documentary into a web-based digital expression, using maps to geographically situate the data and realizing the physical context the bodega infrastructure occupies.

Strip Mall Ethnography: A Definite Direction

2008-09-20T12:47:00.002-07:00

I consider making the fundamental decision of subject to be the most challenging aspect of this project. I've chosen a pretty broad topic/exercise: attempting to image subjective and alternative aspects of the city experience. So many aspects of urban occurrences and experiences are left out of digital expressions.

So where to? I've considered many things. Seeing as I bike around Atlanta a lot, I thought about focusing in that direction. Investigating the cycling community around Atlanta, where cyclists congregate, figuring out why, etc..

I also thought about investigating bike accidents. So many cyclists I've met have been hit by cars and every one of them has had the driver speed off. This usually leads the cyclist conclude that filing a police report would be a waste of time. Yikes. I considered this to be a worthwhile direction in that there are rich and compelling data sets that feed into the phenomena (e.g. traffic patterns, road infrastructure, medical expenses, bike repair expenses, cyclist narratives, a perceived failure of law enforcement, etc.) and few people really seem to be aware of the experience of being a cyclist in Atlanta.

Still, I wasn't getting that "falling in love" feeling that I want to get from my Master's Project topic. So I returned to a topic that I thought of – and really liked – last Fall while working in the Public Design Workshop: Strip Mall Ethnography.

Growing up in the DC suburbs I had come to expect that strip malls were a purely suburban phenomenon. Atlanta, a city of considerable size and population, is a sprawling metropolitan complex filled with strip malls. I had proposed that it might be interesting to take panoramic photos of strip malls around Atlanta using Gigapan technology. Now, returning to this idea a year later, I want to arrive at a better understanding of communities around Atlanta through the lens of the strip mall.

My focus is still quite broad, but now I have a course of action. In the coming weeks I'm going to head out and start taking panoramas of strip malls all over Atlanta as well as digging into possible data sets (e.g. plans/blueprints, commerce/retail economic data, housing demographics surrounding strip malls, etc.). The hope is that I will then have some rich data with which I can make new, interesting and illuminating connections.

Up next: a two-part post on work that will help contextualize my work, stay tuned.

Subjectively Imaging Atlanta

2008-09-15T19:24:00.000-07:00

This blog intends to document the process of my master's project. Below you'll find the very nascent inklings of what I hope will become a solid, narrowly scoped investigation of my experience in the city of Atlanta. This blog will serve as a repository of analogous projects, writings and images that will serve to inform my work.

About the project…

How do we imagine our city spaces? How would a Google map: account for a good spot to watch a sunset cascade from a skyscraper; intimate the precarious – yet thrilling – nature of a parking lot after hours; or portray inequality to incite discourse? Despite the robust expressiveness of the digital medium, cities are typically remediated as maps, urban experiences as starred ratings, places of consequence as push-pins.

For instance, crime maps fail to address the broader social issues that exist behind crimes or the legal procedures that are spurred by police reports. Tying these events to geographic locations also produces an interesting set of constraints. Cities, or parts of cities, are condemned by virtue of featuring more pushpins than other cities or districts.

The city “experience,” or life in the city, transcends the constrained lexicon of way finding and casual reviews. The existing means of digital city representation do not account for the social aspects of the metropolitan experience, the diversity of perspectives existing within the urban scene, or the quantifiable data that can positively affect urban change.

As a master’s project, I would like to employ the affordances of the digital medium to appropriately account for the complexity of metropolitan existence. Ultimately, I would like to arrive at a robust, expressive and engaging digital image of the city. This image could consist of visualizations of data (quantitative or qualitative) and mappings of city spaces (real or imagined) furnished from the subjective perspectives of city residents.

Getting on with it…

As it stands this project exists only as many questions:

Should this take the form of an online social community? If so, what would be the available means of expression? What level of expressive constraint should be imposed?

–or–

Should this exist as an online digital artifact comprised of visualizations authored or chosen by me? Should there be a material correlative (i.e. a printed “map” of these materials)?

–or–

Should this be a digital “Urban Observatory” (as posited by Richard Wurman)? Could it blend of the subjective social aspects of the city and urban utility (i.e. way finding, legislative information, demographic information, etc.)?

–or–

Should this be a narrative using existing means of city representation? For instance, could existing maps, data sets, photos, and reviews be juxtaposed with other media to make more meaningful expressions of the city and the city experience?

Challenges

The largest challenge: articulating this idea to the point that an identifiable “project” materializes. I could also cite technical limitations – like the ability to implement a fully functioning online social community or creating captivating, insightful visualizations – as significant challenges as well. A challenge too, would be defining or better understanding the conventions users have adopted, or invented, to engage their cities online.

The Goal

Ultimately, I’d like to put forth a new means of engaging cities that is both informative and expressive. Or to have as a goal a means of escaping – or enhancing – the way cities and their events are currently represented online.