Since speaking with Chase, we have told the stories of innovators using web-enabled technologies to use all kinds of resources more efficiently, from office spaces to regional rail. Today we return to the streets and cars of New York, and talk to David Mahfouda and Alex Pasternack, two of the people behind a new mobile app that makes booking a car service fast, simple, cheap and, if you want, shared. You’ve seen the posters pasted along a sidewalk near you, now read an interview that explains what Weeels is, how it came about, and what the ideas behind it might mean for the future of how we get around.

Urban Omnibus: What is Weeels? How does it work?
David Mahfouda: Weeels allows users to order cabs with the click of a button, to and from anywhere in the city. The application maps travel routes, provides your fare in advance, and books the ride as well. We work with livery – or chauffeured – cars, which are more prevalent in areas yellow taxis don’t serve.

In addition, leveraging the potential of location-aware social networking, Weeels can pair users taking similar trips so they can share a ride. Users who are flexible about departure time can opt to wait for a match, saving money on the fare and cutting emissions by reducing the total number of car rides.

Alex Pasternack: In short, it links people and taxi cabs to create a more flexible, efficient, reliable, and affordable mode of transit. It begins to address the incredible excess capacity of New York City’s 13,000-car taxi fleet, much of which is underutilized even when engaged in fares; when not, its drivers must often troll around for rides, wasting time and energy. Starting with the premise that we need to not only improve our bike and train infrastructure, but also better use the road infrastructure and vehicles we already have, the mission is to make transit less costly, more flexible and more social. Think of it as transit-friendly rezoning, like the kind the city has been pushing, but for vehicles.

UO: The excess capacity in existing infrastructure is something we think about a lot. Say a little more about how this line of thought influenced you as you came up with Weeels?
David: I started thinking seriously about using existing infrastructure as a design strategy after reading Christopher Alexander’s The Timeless Way of Building. He dedicates a chapter to repair that makes the case for re-use (“Every act of building…is an act of repair”), not from an ecological perspective, but from a truly environmental perspective.

Christopher Alexander is particularly interested in the positive potential of concerted human attention — if we are all repairers/builders, then our environment can be exponentially denser, richer, etc. I see that ethic in projects that deal with excess capacity as well – information and information technology are used as tools to activate or accentuate human agency and attention. Weeels poses this question explicitly by providing an opportunity for a large community of users to improve their environment by acting together.

Alex: I should add that figuring out how to make the city and its inhabitants more responsive to each others’ needs — and turning all of us into agents of repair and renewal — is an especially poignant issue for David. In 2009 he started the Fixer’s Collective, a weekly meeting in Gowanus of amateur and expert tinkerers who attempt to repair and teach how to repair any old household item that New Yorkers bring in.

David: In 2006 Alex and I took a trip on the Trans Siberian railroad, and the immensity of that movement across Asia inspired me think seriously about improving mobility in the United States.

I love trains, but the train infrastructure in the United States is impoverished. If you’re going to think about mobility in the context of the United States, you have to address the automobile directly. So I started to ask, What if the car is not a private transit vehicle, but a public transit vehicle?

Something about the idea seemed inevitable to me, perhaps the correspondence between our digital information systems and physical road/car systems. I built some computer models to approximate the behaviors of these socialized cars. Then the iPhone came out and all of a sudden many of my ideas seemed less like science fiction. So I started mocking up a smart-phone interface — and a few years later, here we are.

Weeels unites our need for mobility, our desire to save money and our responsibility to be more efficient, all underwritten by our willingness to share.Alex: I lived in China for over two years, working as a journalist on the environment, design and urbanism, and saw a society in the throes of a shift from thrift to Western-style excess. To see that country’s twin impulses — the ingenious efficiency and sharing attitudes that came from many lean years, evident in my neighbors’ ability to reuse practically anything that many in the West might consider trash, and the drive toward luxury, literally, in the hordes of private cars that clog the streets of Beijing — I could see more clearly than ever the need for being more conscious of our resources.

The advent of social networking, largely with the rise of Facebook, held out the promise of an interesting technological solution to excess capacity: more responsive shared knowledge, and the many efficiency benefits that could come with it. Imagine a smart version of Craigslist. Now, for instance, we could perhaps know if someone in our friend group was getting rid of a book that we wanted to read — or had extra room in their car or in their cab.

And yet, I’ve been dismayed to see that that promise has never been quite fulfilled. Instead we have more diversions, and certainly more data, but not presented in a way that’s often useful. That’s not to mention the many headaches over privacy, which only underscore the commercial interests that underpin so much of our favorite technology.

That’s starting to change now, in part because users recognize a need. Weeels appeals to me because it makes use of our networks to tackle a very straightforward problem that we intuitively know can and should be solved through sharing. Potentially, its solution is a very elegant one: Weeels unites our need for mobility, our desire to save money and our responsibility to be more efficient in our use of natural resources, all underwritten by our willingness to share.

UO: Given the trouble the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) has had setting up cab sharing stations that are actually used in Manhattan, how do you see Weeels as a successful tool?
Alex: Rather than asking people to wait at a few locations for a cab, imagine that taxi stands can be anywhere. The taxi stands turned cabs into buses, traveling along a fixed route. But what people deserve are buses that turn into cabs, or simply cabs that are easier to use, more accessible, and potentially cheaper than they currently are.

UO: What has been your experience with livery cab drivers and dispatch companies? How have they responded to and participated in the creation and development of Weeels? What do drivers think?
David: The company that we’re currently working with, Eastern Car service, one of the largest in the city, has obviously been very responsive to the work that we’re doing. The manager at Eastern, Marvin Aleman, is himself a technologist — he built the driver’s iPhone application that Weeels accesses when booking rides.

The drivers that I talk to are generally positive about the project. I think they understand that sharing is a necessity in these economic times, and they are excited by the prospect of offering rides to more people. Though Weeels rides feel pretty different from a passenger’s perspective, they’re not actually all that different from a driver’s perspective. We built the product with that in mind. We knew there was room to increase the efficiency of this system without drastically disrupting the way the service works from the provider’s standpoint.

UO: How have you interacted with the TLC?
David: We’ve had conversations with both Commissioner Yassky and Policy Director Gallo. We’re currently waiting to hear back regarding two pilot proposals — one to operate Weeels in a select group of yellow taxis, another to build shared taxi stands/kiosks at transit hubs (like JFK and Grand Central Station) capable of real-time route matching, so that even users without phones can create shared rides to anywhere in NYC.

Photo by Flickr user Joep Roosen.

UO: What is the potential for yellow cabs to eventually be a part of Weeels?
Alex: Huge.

David: Yeah, it would be a fantastic boon for the city if the TLC decided to pilot the Weeels application in yellow vehicles. Drivers would reduce the number of hours they spend trolling around looking for fares, which would decrease the amount of fuel wasted and CO2 emitted on NYC streets. And because it would eliminate the need for trolling, such an app would also allow drivers to get out of their vehicles in between fares, which would decrease the existent negative health risks associated with driving taxis for 12 hours per day.

Drivers would make more money as shared trips would garner higher fares and, given the reduced cost of a shared ride, more customers. City traffic would be significantly reduced as more cheap mobility in the city would obviate the need and/or desire for private vehicle transit. It would be possible to hail a cab in the rain, and to do it without even having to go outside until the last minute.

The city would effectively multiply its accessible and utilizeable public space as the interior of vehicles becomes a place for encountering the city and its other inhabitants. (That’s especially true if the city chooses a progressive automotive design via the Taxi of Tomorrow competition. This design reorients the interior of the taxi to make it feasible to actually hold a party of four comfortably.)

Regarding the way Weeels will work practically with yellow cabs: rather than using Weeels as a booking instrument, it would be a way for prospectives (taxi-hailers) to access rides already in progress. On the other hand, as a passenger, I would be able to “open” my ride to other prospectives headed my direction. I would be able to identify those prospective passengers, and choose which I would like to pick up to reduce the environmental and monetary cost of my ride.

Alex: Also: the TLC recently and quietly ended its accessible cabs program, which allowed handicapped New Yorkers to dispatch yellow cabs specifically designed for handicapped-accessibility. It’s no surprise that handicapped rights groups are upset about this. Weeels for yellow cabs could prove to be one solution.

UO: What about Weeels’ relationship to privately-owned mass transit, which is especially prevalent in Brooklyn with services such as the Flatbush dollar vans. Can you talk about Weeels in the context of multi-modal connectivity between different types and modes of transport.
Alex: We’re building Weeels to become an ubiquitous interface for optimizing all kinds of unrouted vehicle transit. The algorithms we’re testing on taxis are directly applicable to many other kinds of unrouted vehicles currently operating on the US roadscape.

David: Since Weeels runs on digital, responsive infrastructure, not on fixed routes or schedules, it will, as a matter of fact, come to be most useful where other fixed transit infrastructure (again, anything that runs on a fixed schedule or route) doesn’t provide service. Namely, in the seams: Weeels cars and Weeels passengers will be most prevalent wherever existing modes of transport cannot or have not yet provided mobility.

What’s more, these patterns will be self-reinforcing. As Weeels establishes itself as a transit mode along a particular route, that route will become more popular (and cheaper, and more efficient) until individually-organized mobility is no longer needed along that corridor, and Weeels use establishes itself fluidly in some other sector of a city or even county.

Learn more — and get the iPhone and mobile web version of the app — at Weeels.org.

David Mahfouda is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Weeels. David graduated from Harvard in 2005 with a degree in Visual and Environmental Studies and received a master’s degree in Product Architecture and Engineering from Stevens Institute in 2009. He is a member of EyeBeam’s Sustainability and Urban Research groups, the founder of Flag Project, a co-founder of the Fixers’ Collective, and a co-curator of this year’s TRANSPORT exhibit at Proteus Gowanus.

Alex Pasternack is the Chief Communications Officer for Weeels. A native New Yorker, Alex Pasternack has worked as an editor and writer with a deep interest in the environment and design. Since Harvard, where he studied History and Literature and worked on environmental campaigns, Alex has been interested in the essential role that infrastructure and transportation plays in creating a sustainable future. His writing has appeared in Time, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Christian Science Monitor, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Foreign Policy, Paper, Icon, Metropolis and TreeHugger, among others.

Graphics courtesy of Weeels.

App-lovers take note: the NYC Economic Development Corporation has presented the winners of its NYC BigApps contest. The winners, who received cash prizes ranging from $500 to $5,000, include the grand prize-winning WayFinder NYC, an augmented reality application that helps users find the nearest subway station, Taxihack, which allows users to share reviews of their taxi drivers, and the Popular Choice Award winner NYC Way, which combines over 30 iPhone applications that sort, by proximity, information about nearby swimming pools, wifi hotspots, post offices, emergency rooms, street vendors, and more.

The pedestrian plazas in Midtown have people buzzing once again, and this time not about the chaise-longues. The New York Times got word from an unidentified city official that the anticipated traffic flow reduction has not met the DOT’s expectations. It is not clear whether the experimental project will be made permanent, but in the meantime both supporters and detractors are eager to see the data made public. Streetsblog reminds us that traffic flow is not the only indicator of success for this project, noting a significant reduction in pedestrian deaths in the area and the support of local businesses and such groups as the Times Square Alliance.

Vishaan Chakrabarti’s Double Down on Density has sparked quite a bit of conversation this week, both here on the Omnibus and around the web. Questions are being asked and comments are being made about the Northeast Corridor, how regional configurations come into play, how infrastructure spending is often cast as “debt and pork,” and our nation’s consistent cultural tendency towards highways and sprawl. The discussion, with Chakrabarti’s responses, continues — join in. There is plenty more to talk about.

Also garnering some attention lately is Vanessa Keith’s recent feature Clip-on Architecture. Fans take note: her piece was adapted from a more extensive article that is now available for download here (PDF). And in other climate-aware news, a panel of experts this week presented over 100 recommendations for how to make New York City’s building codes greener. The measures are referred to as “suggestions” for now, and the panel acknowledged the need for financing and incentives for developers, but Bloomberg sees this as a key advancement in his goal to reduce greenhouse emissions by 30% by 2030. Stay tuned to see how this plays out.

In other transportation news, consulting firm Frost and Sullivan released a report last week that car sharing is up 117% since 2007 (via TreeHugger). Additionally, Streetsblog reports that the Seward Park Houses foray into community-specific car sharing has been wildly popular. The program is run by Hertz and makes use of two of Seward Park’s parking spaces, with claims that each shared car replaces 14 personal cars. Lower East Side residents take note: The program is now open to the general public.

We’ll end this roundup with some fun with maps, photos and archi-art for your weekend perusal. Map lovers, expect to waste some serious time exploring both the New York Public Library’s brand new georectification (!) maps site (via Gothamist) and the 1924 aerial map on NYCityMap (via Curbed) — though Omnibus readers might remember (as Steven Romalewski mentioned in the Curbed comments) that OASIS offers a look back as far as 1609 and explorations of more recent development, in greater detail, from 1996 to the present. For an alternately angled New York City view, WNYC has posted two photo slideshows by Stephen Nessen of underground happenings: one of Grand Central from one hundred feet below and one of the tunnels for the 7 train extension (via The Infrastructurist). Finally, we recently discovered the blog butdoesitfloat and its architecture-centric art eye candy. We highly recommend perusing the archive for a stunning collection of images ranging from a David Maisel photography series on mining to an unearthed LIFE magazine photoessay on Le Corbusier in his studio:

Top image: 100 feet below Grand Central Station, photo by Stephen Nessen, via WNYC. Bottom image: Photo by David Maisel, via butdoesitfloat.com. The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

The Building as Microcosm
I run a communication design firm. We create projects that take design cues from insights on how people interact with information. Most recently we created an online platform called STACKD. It is a directory, a marketplace, a communications channel and a lens through which to view the city.

The idea for this project came from a number of observations after our company moved into a 20-story building on W 28th Street. First of all, we were new to the building; we did not know anyone here. Secondly, this building has some size to it. It may not be huge by New York standards, but there are over 100 tenants: four to six tenants to every floor, accessed via two main elevators with a freight elevator serving as back-up for when the mains fail (and they often do). Our previous location was a six-story building in which we knew everyone, for better or for worse. Eminem’s Record label Shady Records thumped away directly one floor above and sewing machines whirred from the sweatshop beneath us. Even though I knew who was in the building, the moment the elevator doors opened to reveal such different realities was always jarring. This sense of curiosity about what might be happening inside a large vertical building became even more pronounced once we had moved to our current, significantly taller location. I was reminded of writings by Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas that grapple with disjunction and multiplicity, so I spent some time rereading Architecture and Disjunction and Delirious New York. Tschumi distinguishes three basic types of relationships between the actual and intended uses of architectural space:

“Specifically, three basic types of relations can be distinguished: (a) the reciprocal relation, for example to skate on the skating rink; (b) the indifferent relation, for example to skate in the schoolyard; and (c) the conflictual relation, for example to skate in the chapel, to skate on the tightrope” (Tschumi 1996: p. 186)

The unexpected mix of program in a Manhattan highrise isn’t exactly “skating in the chapel” but it nonetheless excites and feeds the imagination. Rem Koolhaas sets the stage for multiplicity when he retells the birth of the skyscraper in 1909:

“The building becomes a stack of individual privacies … the use of each platform can never be known in advance of its construction…” (Koolhaas 1994: p. 85)

As we started getting familiar with our new neighborhood on the last street of the Flower District, I was curious who else was in our building. Being able to listen to the conversations in a class C building such as 150 W 28th Street would reveal much that is unexpected: a healing center that provides “scream therapy”; a wholesale-only purveyor of minerals and crystals; one of the city’s most prominent florists. The rent is reasonable for New York and the neighborhood has an ad-hoc, undefined quality that has attracted a wide range of businesses from a variety of sectors. Brief glimpses of floor directories revealed other creative industries such as design, advertising, architecture and photography. Even though some of them are the competition, it always makes me feel welcome to know there are other companies nearby that do something similar. The history of the neighborhood and its role as the Garment District has also left a trace. The last of the fur trimmers that once defined this part of the city are here, dustmotes of mink in every corner.

Supply and Demand
I caught glimpses of people in the buildings across the alley and noticed when offices were suddenly empty after they had housed busy bunches of people for months. It made me nervous, but I talked to people in the elevator, asked what they did and never had more than a few seconds to find out. Strange how we share the ride staring at our feet. People make crude flyers and notes posting items for sale or marketing their services in the elevator but they rarely pause to talk – maybe because the elevator is always moving and the chime urges you to get out quickly.

Sharing resources between multiple floors… can play a role in making the city – and its use of space – more legible. A palpable sense of the great story of New York City unfolding all around us appealed to my imagination. As an entrepreneur accustomed to identifying demand, I began to see the building as a potential market for our services. Craigslist and Ebay proved that there was a huge dormant need to connecting buyers and sellers on an individual scale. If we didn’t know already, Facebook showed that people are social animals and thrive on sharing something of themselves with each other. Twitter is taking the world by storm just by giving people a megaphone and 140 characters of broadcast time. As designers versed in proposing solutions we began to imagine whether we could create something that could make use of our specific physical location – something that would open doors for us but could also connect supply and demand on a larger scale.

One of the reasons our business is located in New York City, and I imagine the same holds true for many others, is opportunity. In my mind, opportunity is intensified by density – a density of potential clients, of talented people, of inspiration and also the density of competition. Kenneth Jackson recently lectured on the five reasons why New York will bounce back from the current recession to thrive in the next century: Density, diversity, tolerance, aspiration and the willingness to change. All of his arguments can be found above and below my desk on the 14th floor. With this in mind, we decided to narrow our focus for STACKD to an extreme. We wanted to create a way to reach the other businesses in our own building. Wouldn’t they have similar needs to our own?

How it works
STACKD emphasizes physical proximity in each feature that it offers. Users are prompted to act upon the information STACKD provides for the simple reason that updates are extremely timely and that someone else is easy to reach because they are located close by. You can see these qualities emerging in systems that did not originally account for them. For example, Craigslist users have introduced an informal feature dubbed “curb-alert” in which people post when and where they are going to put something out for free pick-up. If it’s close to where you are, you score.

Let me give you a quick tour through the STACKD user interface.

The current version does only a few things. On a map, it shows which buildings belong to the network. Once a user wants to know more and has selected a building they are prompted to log into the system (or join if they are not a member yet). Membership is important to track information and to ensure that only users who are willing to share information can also access it. Once you are logged in and click on a building you can see – listed in a vertical stack – the businesses located there. Selecting a particular business reveals contact information and industry as well as what the business offers and needs on a regular basis. If that’s all you need to know, then click on the contact email address and send the business a note or give them a call. Above this directory listing is an area that we call the feed. This is where the building does its talking and where you can listen in. Every building is set up with a twitter account so that others can tweet to it and follow the collective conversation. Once you have used STACKD for a while, the twitter feature becomes an important alert to information that is time-sensitive or changing. I could tweet that I have a chair to sell, or that I am looking for a tip on where to go for lunch. If we were to consider our building to be part of a network that can circumvent the borders of individual offices then I could also let other businesses know when our conference room is free or that we have a spare desk on Thursdays and Fridays.

Clearly, resource sharing requires an open attitude and the desire to change established conventions. However, with coworking communities emerging throughout New York City, sharing resources between multiple floors may not be far behind. As we continue to work on STACKD and as it expands to other buildings, perhaps it can play a role in making the city and its use of space more legible. Architectural typologies could adapt to contemporary needs and business cycles. The first step is seeing what is happening. One of the biggest challenges with large amounts of information is making sense of it all. As visual creatures, we’re equipped with sophisticated interpretative capabilities that yield insights at a glance far more readily than confronted with purely quantitative information. With the right interface and mapping capabilities we could gain a more fine-grained understanding of what kinds of activities are performed in what parts of the city.

Networked Spaces and the Future of the City

Urban Omnibus recently published a number of articles that address the issue of excess capacity. In a conversation with Rosalie Genevro, Frank Duffy commented on how corporations’ use of space leaves it underutilized much of the time. He posits that spaces must have the idea of change built into them in order to adapt. The theme of underutilization also drives an article with ZipCar founder Robin Chase, that introduced a ride-sharing platform to make use of the excess capacity of individual seats in a car heading to a shared destination. Laura Forlano reflected on the proliferation of coworking spaces in the city. Meanwhile, New York City has discussed ways to enable cab sharing and hopefully will soon find a way to implement bike-sharing.

All of these efforts share something simple: in order to make use of the excess capacity in a network, I have to see that it exists and I have to be able to access it. STACKD offers an interface that could fit this need. Individual offices could be transformed into a network that functions as a marketplace connecting supply and demand of services, products and resources. Planners could see a fine-grain use pattern result from zoning initiatives and open-space guidelines. Businesses such as restaurants could position their next location based on geolocated market analytics. Start-ups could join ad-hoc incubators by knowing where strategic partnerships might flourish. In the city of the future, I might be able to use space and do business more efficiently. Perhaps excess space could be allocated to form building-wide or neighborhood-wide amenities. Underutilized buildings would display why they are ignored and could be retrofitted with more flexible typological configurations. Owners could make decisions about their property portfolio by incorporating space utilization statistics. We just might learn which parts of the city will continue to thrive and why.

Sidney Blank runs the strategic communication design firm Supermetric. His background in architecture greatly influences the methodology and areas of interest of his work as a designer. STACKD is the first self-initiated project created by Supermetric that aims to tie people, architecture and business together. Sidney currently teaches in the Design & Management department at Parsons, The New School.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Frank Duffy is a British architect, noted for his research and design work on the changing nature of the modern office. He is the author of Work and the City, one of five books in Black Dog’s Edge Futures series that explores the impact of global climate change on various aspects of social life, including education, transportation, community and Duffy’s own realm of expertise: the nature – and spaces – of work. Duffy’s command of this topic is rare, honed in the thirty-six years since he co-founded DEGW, an architectural firm whose emphasis on social-scientifically informed space-planning practices, organizational consultancy and post-occupancy evaluation makes it singular in the field.

In the book, Duffy argues against contemporary cities’ irrationally low use of their existing office space. In so doing, he echoes in unexpected ways Robin Chase’s call to maximize our use of excess capacity in transportation. And he foreshadows Laura Forlano’s future-facing analysis of new intentional communities springing up in self-organized work environments.

On a recent visit to New York, Duffy took Rosalie Genevro, executive director of the Architectural League, on a walk around Lower Manhattan, to reflect on our office stock and what it means in the context of our changing city.

Read an excerpt of their conversation below, followed by an audio-slideshow of their walk. -C.S.

Rosalie Genevro: Do you see any glimmer of hope in our recent and current financial meltdown?

Frank Duffy: I think the crisis might stimulate a beneficial thought process, in two principal ways. The first is related to the question of sustainability, which I think is going to work its way through the whole system. And the second of course is information technology, which is changing the nature of organizations. The building isn’t a useful unit of analysis anymore, because organizations are always bigger or smaller and constantly changing. At least half of them operate in a virtual world, in a placeless world. The crisis is going to demonstrate that there’s too much space. And a lot of people are going to be frightened by that. Hopefully that fright will lead to some beneficial realizations.

RG: It may be a very painful transition – it seems to me that we already have a lot of empty space that won’t be absorbed because it won’t be needed.

You also make the argument in Work and the City that even in terms of existing space that is occupied, we use it at an irrationally low level – it is just not inhabited much of the time.  Even for people whose interest is in making money from the built environment, that argument doesn’t seem to have penetrated.

Buildings aren’t made out of glass, concrete and stone: they’re made out of time, layers of time.FD: Actually, I think it will penetrate eventually.  I thought, twenty years ago when I spend a lot of time encouraging development, that facilities managers would bring some intelligence into the system; but instead of thinking about the supply chain, they were much more interested in their own deliverables rather than longer-term use value. The vertical silos that exist within these very large corporations pose another very important problem. We need to weave together, keeping the end-user’s point of view in mind, the organizational silos within which, say, human resources departments look after human resources departments and information technology staff interact only with information technology staff. In that context, it is very difficult to create organizations that are agile.

That being said, there are many things about the American office that are extremely intelligent that Europeans didn’t necessarily pick up on until much later. Americans were less interested in the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk and supported the skills of people like interior designers, space planners, decorators and others whose scope – within the building – was to meet the short-term needs of five- or ten-year tenants. That system was invented here. It’s a wonderful system. And it’s a perfect example of not getting everything “right in a night” but leaving scope for change and adaptation. That’s the principle that I’m trying to articulate in this conversation. Not all design decisions have the same longevity. Buildings aren’t made out of glass and concrete and stone: they’re made out of time, layers of time.

One of the things I like about New York is the juxtaposition of the old and new in the way that the blocks have been developed. That is a component of the recipe for success of long-term urban fabric: it is capable of being modified internally and externally as social and technological change develops. Older stock has been moved out of exclusive office use into other purposes, older buildings turned into apartments for example.

RG: If we are to build fewer new buildings, how do we decide what’s worth building?

FD: Well, I think you can test that. You can think through the process of working on a floor plate or building section, thinking about what its use-potential is.  If I were a building owner these days, that’s something I’d be interested in: the future potential of existing structures, whether they’ll have to be extensively modified to cope with change or not.

I am very much involved with the Olympics at the moment in London.  The so-called “legacy” and “transitional” phases of the Olympic sites are very important.  We’re trying to do a think-over of a way of designing things that can mutate and develop into other things over time.  One of the curses of architecture is its instantaneity.  The definite statements of each individual building do not necessarily cumulatively add up to something that has got the idea of change built into it.  But urbanism should include that idea, and older cities have had that capacity to accommodate change. The mono-functionality that you see from here very clearly is vulnerable.

Another theme is that the design and use of interstitial spaces – made in the context of the knowledge economy – is becoming more important than the buildings themselves or what happens inside them. So, designing for the full spectrum of uses over a large area, having a mix of uses and then having the principle of change built into that so it can develop and mutate and move from one kind of use to another. These are the fundamental secrets of urbanism.

The building isn’t a useful unit of analysis anymore.RG: How can you design for that? That has always seemed to be the accreted nature of cities. The most interesting places tend not to be the work of one hand, of one designer.

FD: Or one financier. It’s always been difficult, but I think we’ve made it worse by the way in which buildings are financed, procured and developed. Cumulatively, over the course of the twentieth century, this has made each building more and more specific and separate in itself rather than something that adds to a more complex urban fabric.

Certainly, from an architectural and user point of view, I’d think about what different building forms can accommodate, and how ambiguity, choice and potential can be built into design over a long period. Thinking about the buildings themselves in a much more sophisticated way. But also thinking about the nature of the interstitial spaces – who owns them, who manages them, who loves them, who takes advantage of them. That’s something that we have not given enough thought to.

RG: Thinking about the interstitial spaces as providing for serendipity or accommodating the unexpected is very hard to do as a designer.

FD: Well I don’t see why it needs to be so. It’s all about scenarios, thinking through what could happen, and what is fixed.

RG: What’s the appropriate role of the public and public decision-making bodies in all of this?

FD: The city and citizens are two levels.  The city should always fight for the long-term.  The individuals always try to find ways of penetrating the system to make sure that it meets their changing needs.  There are feedback channels that should be built into much more of the urban fabric.

The fascinating paradox of the power of technology and its ability to allow people to choose when and where to work, is that it actually makes more poignant and more important the city-like things that are good at bringing people together. The more we disperse, the more we need to congregate. I think the true nature of a city is discourse, especially in a knowledge economy. It’s about places – serendipitous encounters. That’s another design principle to be brought into urbanism. Places that are valuable because they are unprogrammed and open-ended and allow accidents to happen.

For a long time there was a correlation between the patterns of work and the shape of the building. What’s happening now is that patterns of work are changing faster than the shape of the buildings. And we have models of buildings that are inherently vulnerable because they are not good at accommodating groups, they are not permeable, they make assumptions about levels of occupancy that are untenable and easily refuted. They can’t be changed into anything else.

They’re brittle – they snap, they can only do one trick.

I became aware of this in the 60s and 70s in the regeneration of the decayed industrial cities of the UK – Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham. In order to bring great stretches of the Liverpool docks back into beneficial use, we had to realize that the older buildings – because they were robust and adaptable – could be used for a wide range of purposes apart from what was originally designed. They could be used as art galleries, workshops or hotels, for example.

What’s the lesson there? The lesson is about making a building tough enough to accommodate change, to have enough volume, to have columns in the right places, attractive ceiling heights, a relationship to the sky and the outside that is tolerable. These were considered to be obsolete and useless, but they were brought back to life. So I think the difference is that these newer office buildings are so flimsy – so value-engineered – that they have only a very limited range of utility.

The reinvention of place, the pleasure of place, the use of place for talk, commerce, etc. That’s terrific. To be freed from the “8-hour day.”  These are, in human terms, recent inventions, no older than 200 years. People thought of and used time in a very different way before that.  And we’ll invent something new ourselves. This discussion about the nature of buildings is only a subset of a much broader discourse about the nature of life in what I hope will be a much better world. I don’t think the twentieth century’s my favorite century actually. I think there were one or two things wrong with it.

Click ‘Play’ button below to start slideshow

Interview conducted by Rosalie Genevro. Edited and condensed.
Photos by Cassim Shepard.

Image courtesy of GoLoco

Tell us a little about the founding of Zipcar.
For some innovations, there really is a perfect moment of confluence. It was like that with Zipcar. Zipcar was launched in June of 2000. My co-founder is German, and car sharing as we know it originated in Germany. One day she was sitting at a café in Berlin, and she saw a shared car across the street.  She came back to Cambridge and she asked what I thought of this idea. I had just come from my 10th business school anniversary, and this was the height of dot-com mania. Starting a company seemed like an obvious idea.

At the time, wireless was being talked about endlessly. It was the new cool thing. But the only wireless application people had thought up was cell phones.  Zipcar was a very early application of wireless that wasn’t cell phones. I thought, “Wow, this is what the Internet was made for: sharing a scarce resource among many people. This is what wireless was made for: we can make transactions very easy for end users and brokering those transactions will cost us next to nothing.”

Besides, this is what I wanted personally. I have three kids and one car that my husband takes to an office where it sits, unused, for eight hours a day, so I never have access to a car. Plus, I live in a city and there’s no way in hell I want to have a second car that I have to maintain and own and park. The lightbulb went off: the costs for car ownership definitely outweigh the benefits for me in the city, and wireless and the Internet can make this easy.

The environmental piece of it was obvious, and if I hadn’t perceived a sustainable business model, I wouldn’t have started it. I don’t think I would have started a business that had no social benefits because I wasn’t interested in spending 120 hours/week for years doing something that was just to make money.

This is what the internet was made for: sharing a scarce resource among many people. And here we are nine years later. What’s really striking is how things have changed that people don’t even consider. When we started, 25% of adults had cell phones, and only 50% of people had access to the Internet, and that was at work. So we were operating in an environment, from a technology perspective, where I felt I knew where the trends were going, we just had to make significant strategic decisions based on those trends.  Looking back, one of the things that Zipcar taught me was that sharing an asset is incredibly fabulous for everyone involved. When you share a car, it’s great for companies, great for individuals, great for cities.

When I learned about mesh networking, I thought, “Wow! This is exactly the same kind of thing on a much bigger scale.” I love the beauty of the economics of it: individuals will happily pay for individual devices to perform a specific service, but in so doing build a communications infrastructure. I was totally fascinated with this concept. It’s so beautiful from an economic standpoint: just how huge the unanticipated benefits are when sharing a device.

I believe in a heartfelt way that energy efficiency has to do with behavior, and behavior is driven by price and ease of use. By simplicity. For cars, the only way we will change our driving habits is when we’re paying the real cost of driving: including the cost of carbon, the cost of congestion, the cost of building and maintaining the roads. And the easiest way to be able to pay the real cost of transportation would be if we had ubiquitous data grids. It’s the same thing that we talk about with the smart grid: dynamically priced power consumption, with the real price of what it’s costing.

Image courtesy of Zipcar

People love the idea of smart buildings, with sensors everywhere. But the sensors have to go back to someplace. They have to go back to someone who’s paying attention to what those sensors say. What we need is a ubiquitous database to help us A) price energy correctly, and B) not to have to think too hard about it. For example, no matter how many times I tell my son to turn the lights off before going to bed, he forgets to do it. Wouldn’t it be great to have all those sensor networks that we know about to turn it off for him! When it’s 2am and no one has moved in the house for the last hour, perhaps it’s time for sensors to turn all the lights off.

If you’re asking me to make the analysis of what times of day and night I use my hot water heater, and to turn it down accordingly, it will never happen. If you ask the gas company to do an analysis of people’s water heaters and then to ask me, “Robin, do you want us to turn it down and save yourself $40 over the year?” I’ll say, “Of course.” With a ubiquitous data grid, we could rely on technology to make it easy for us to use resources more efficiently. We could price things more accurately. Technology will play a big role in how we handle our energy consumption.

What do you see as the role of government in handling our energy consumption?
Some in Washington are willing to do what’s difficult, but many in the House and in the Senate are not. The political reality drives me crazy: people have been pushing off the need to raise gas taxes for 18 years now and there’s only so long you can go without maintaining your roads or building your bridges or financing your transit systems. We’ve kicked the can down the road and we can only do that for so long.

Infrastructure is destiny yet infrastructure, typically, is not adaptable… We need to make flexible infrastructure. In your city, in New York, the head of the MTA Lee Sander, just resigned under that particular issue. He was saying that we need to solve this now, and the governor was saying, “You know what? Let’s come up with some creative financing solutions that don’t involve us paying this year, or the next year, or the year after.”

Fundamentally, I think all scales of government need to work on public information. Politicians say they follow what the people want, and the people want cars and roads, and they don’t want to finance public transit, and they don’t want to think about CO2 emissions, and they don’t want to pay for congestion.

When I talk to people, they’re often quick to say, “I’m paying my gas tax, why aren’t you maintaining the road” or “I’m paying the toll, I’ve done my duty”, and they don’t realize that they’re paying the price that built it 20 years ago, but what about maintaining and operating it? The public doesn’t make that connection, and I think the government needs to do a lot more educating.

So, as you have moved from Zipcar to GoLoco, from car sharing to ride sharing, do you see ride sharing as more of a national set of strategies?
Yes, car sharing only works in dense metropolitan areas or in cases where people don’t need a car to get to work. If you need a car to get to work, you’re going to have to own your own car. The cost of car sharing is too high for a daily commute. But, then again, according to the National Households Consumer Survey, across the nation it costs $24 per day on average that people are spending in America on their car, day in and day out. If I were to tell you that it was going to cost $125 a week to go to work, you would say, no way, I’m not going to do it. But we are doing it – we just don’t realize we’re doing it.

That’s why I did GoLoco – I said, what about all those other people who are feeling similar transportation and mobility pains but they need a car to get to work? Ride sharing is for those people.

Screenshot: www.goloco.org

Can you give us ride sharing 101? How can GoLoco change how we get around?
The big idea for ride sharing and for GoLoco is to think of your car, your expenses, your friends, and your trips as part of your own personal public transportation system. Your friends and their cars and their trips are ways that you can get around. It builds on the idea of long tail media and long tail economics. Ride sharing is the long tail of public transportation. There are rides that serve little niches of demand way out there, in places where you’ll never see a bus service, or a public transportation service of any kind, but you would see ride sharing, because of the individuals who do go way out there. Basically, if you look at the long tail, ride sharing can meet the needs of small groups of individuals who need to get from a specific origin to a specific destination at a particular time.

I think when we look back at ourselves sitting alone in our 120 square feet of car, driving down these highways with incredible storage costs and incredible operating costs, I think we will look back at how we travel today and be just astounded: astounded at the cost, astounded at the waste. It’s such a wacky idea that we’d want to be alone in our cars spending huge sums of money and all that parking space, when it was less fun and more expensive and kind of crazy.

This is why I did GoLoco. We know that we can’t build our way out of congestion, so if things are increasingly, year after year, getting more congested, there’s only one solution for that: addressing the cost of driving over peak periods.

At $2 per gallon, people spend 18% of their income on their car, and that’s without paying for congestion pricing or tax increases or any other changes to transportation financing coming down the road. But it’s not in the control of any government to effect what the ultimate price of gas is going to be when we have increasing demand from India and China, and arguably peak oil. We have an increasing world population that will continue to drive cars with gasoline on our roads. Ride sharing is going to be significant while we transform our infrastructure to be less car-dependent. While we have such a high cost of car travel in such a car-dependent country, I don’t see another solution. 86% of trips made are alone in a car. Think about standing in a mall, looking at a parking lot. You know that a large number of people there are going exactly where you’re going in the next five minutes.

Photo: Tom Harrison

There are two ways to think about taxis. Taxis are great if we look at the percent of time that they’re in motion with someone going someplace. I bet it’s pretty high and they aren’t taking up parking spaces or any of that storage space, which is an excellent thing. But, if we think of taxis that are driving around in circles, that’s not so good.

And now there’s talk in New York of taxi sharing possibilities. I think the only time I ever shared a taxi was during the transit strike.
Exactly. People discuss whether ride sharing is something we can do or not do, culturally. But in a circumstance like a transit strike, or a taxi strike, within hours people were willing to share cabs. You could hop in a cab and instead of being one passenger in one car, suddenly we’re willing to have many people in a car.

The question of why we don’t share taxis is very similar to why we don’t share cars. One problem is that it seems culturally weird. When I get out at JFK, why can’t I ask the person standing next to me, “Where are you going, do you want to share a cab?” For some reason, that’s socially unacceptable.  And then when you’re not at an airport, the problem becomes where to stand to even hail a shared cab to begin with.

On the street, one of the issues is a lack of visibility. When I think about taxi sharing, it’s the same thing. If you could tell me on the exterior of the taxi, if there was a sign that said “going to LaGuardia” or “going to 42nd Street,” if that were displayed on the outside, then it would be more easy for me to realize “Oh, I can share cabs and I can stick my hand out and catch this particular cab.” But right now it’s all kind of hidden, it’s not an obvious option.

Photo by Flickr user Ykmm85

The Taxi and Limousine Commission just recently adopted the recommendation to develop group ride locations and ride share fares.
That’s great, and Manhattan has a good attribute that not very many cities have: it’s very vertical. Ride sharing relies on getting small groups of people together – you have to create critical mass. In Manhattan, if you have two people standing at on a corner there’s a good chance you’re both going uptown or downtown, so it’s possible to share a cab. But in a city where you have a lot more directions than uptown and downtown you’re going to have to have a lot more than two people standing at that corner to make it worthwhile.

Photo by Flickr user dmboyer

I’ve heard you say, “Infrastructure is destiny?” Can you elaborate?
Infrastructure is destiny. Think about how we built out the national highway interstate network in the ’50s. We built highways, we ripped out all the trolleys, and we didn’t build any trains. We created our destiny as a car dependent nation because that’s the infrastructure we built up. When we think about sprawl, we must remember that we built our houses on one-acre lots and now our choices for interaction are defined by that.

I think a lot about it in terms of the internet as well. Countries that have a robust and low-cost internet infrastructure are the ones that have access to information and the ability to innovate. Our infrastructure allows us to do things in an easy way or to do things in a difficult way. And we all like to do things easily. When our infrastructure makes things easy and convenient, we do more of those things. When things are made difficult, we do less of them. We have set up our infrastructure to make getting in your car, going door to door really easy, as the cheapest, fastest way.  Getting there by bike or by foot is frequently terrifying and dangerous, so which way do we go?  So, yes, infrastructure is our destiny.

Are there other innovations right now that are particularly exciting to you?
At this very minute I’m hard at work putting together a project to build an open platform for cars that would make getting technology in your car more like downloading things onto your iPod. What I’m hoping to do is to put a technology platform on there that enables an infinite number of applications to be downloaded to a vehicle, enabling us to innovate on modes of access, ways of using the vehicle, ownership, use of time, how we understand our environment around us in terms of congestion and pricing and information.

Technology has a potential of making data exchange between everything simple and easy, but it’s siloed. Transportation technology today is closed and proprietary, so only GM gets to decide what goes onto an OnStar when there are a thousand things that could be interesting to do with a more open platform. But GM is making the choices and look at the choices they’ve made!

Are there other sectors, beyond transit, that you think are ripe for shared, use-on-demand systems?
Through the car platform I’ve been doing some lobbying in Washington to raise awareness about technology investments in all sectors – the smart grid, education, health care, transportation, etc. Instead of producing closed proprietary devices and closed proprietary networks, I’d like our political leaders to realize that it benefits everybody and lowers costs if devices and networks are multipurpose.

I’m very interested in looking at excess capacity everywhere.

In New York City, you have an example of a failed sharing.  After 9/11 an emergency, wireless communication network was built. I think they spent 200 million dollars on that network just across Manhattan, and the network is not being used to capacity.  Emergency responders will tell you that they don’t want to use the excess capacity in case they need it down the line. But what people fail to realize is that networks can give priority and can guarantee delivery to the party who gets that first priority. We could say that that 200 million dollar network built in New York City goes to emergency services first, every time, no question. But when there’s not an emergency there’s extra capacity left over and we pay for it as taxpayers. I’m very interested in looking at excess capacity everywhere.

The next phase is to look beyond climate change to a more general understanding of sustainability. With 6.7 billion people on the planet growing to 9 billion, we’ve already taken our planet to the limit. We’re going to be taking it past the limit, and so every single resource that we use we should scale up to its maximum capacity. And I would put dollars in that list of scarce resources.

Building stock – especially office space that’s not used at night – is an important resource that has a lot of excess capacity.
I was in Holland a couple of years ago and I was looking at the old, merchant row houses. The merchants who lived there initially had their shops on the ground floor with their families living above.  With maybe three or four floors, each family could also have renters or storage space or a larger family. Those houses were so versatile.  Some of the industrial warehouses we built in this country are like that, highly versatile. But then you compare them to the giant office high-rises that are made for offices with floor plans so gigantic that once you stop doing AT&T call centers there, there isn’t another blessed thing that you’d want to do in that space.  We are building our infrastructure in a way that has almost no flexibility.  It’s this particular thing that you’re doing there or that’s it.

So, again, what do you do about $5/gallon gas?  Do we want to have four lanes of traffic for cars when maybe, sometime in the future, we may want to run a transit line down the middle, or do a dedicated bus lane, or have bicycles? My guess would be in 100 years it’s not going to be four lanes of single occupancy vehicles. I think the most successful solution is to produce things that can be adaptable, highly adaptable. Infrastructure is destiny yet infrastructure, typically, is not adaptable. That’s why it often plays out in bad ways. We need to make flexible infrastructure. Maybe that’s the new catch word.

Photo: Tor-Erik Bakke

Interview conducted by Jebediah Reed and Cassim Shepard. Edited and condensed.
Homepage illustration by Shumi Bose.

Work and the Open Source City. Illustration: Shumi Bose

One chilly Wednesday afternoon in late May, I joined a small group of technologists, researchers, architects and urban planners on a field trip through Lower Manhattan and three distinct neighborhoods in Brooklyn to get a glimpse of the future of work. The trip was organized by Todd Sundsted, an entrepreneur and co-author (with Drew Jones and Tony Bacigalupo) of the book I’m Outta Here! The group met around mid-day at New Work City, one of Manhattan’s first “coworking” communities. The space, located on the 5^th Fl. of the building adjacent to the famous music venue Sounds of Brazil (SOBs) on the corner of Houston and Varick, officially opened to members in November 2008.

New Work City. Photo: Tony Lupo / NWCNY

Coworking is rapidly emerging as a meme for the reorganization of knowledge work among entrepreneurs, programmers, writers and even, as we learned during our visits, sustainable furniture designers. The majority of discussions of the social implications of the Internet on the evolution of work and cities revolve around concepts such as the virtual office, online collaboration, and telecommuting. But, coworking communities (and related phenomenon that have grown out of the culture of the open source movement such as MeetUps and BarCamps) illustrate the ways in which these emergent forms of organizing are deeply embedded in physical places and, at the same time, enabled by new technologies such as laptops and wireless networks.

New Work City. Photo: Tony Lupo / NWCNY

As the material artifacts of offices – messages, documents, photos and plans – are digitized and stored on servers, physical spaces have the potential to become increasingly open, flexible and sharable. Data security concerns aside, one can imagine a future scenario when most of the tools that we need to work effectively will be accessed and stored in “the cloud”. This allows the dynamic reorganization and co-location of people, firms and activities that have been separated since the early days of industrialization, the advent of the hierarchical firm and the rise of cities themselves. For example, an office building might house a conference room that doubles as an entertainment room for the co-located apartments. Such arrangements will require new ways of thinking about private and semi-private spaces, trust and security, and ownership and property.

Rather than lonely, pajama-clad programmers holed up in Grandma’s basement, a closer look at the nature of virtual work reveals that after several years of experimentation — ranging from working from home in relative isolation to slouching uncomfortably at Starbucks — mobile workers (including freelancers, the self-employed, remote workers and entrepreneurs) have begun to band together to form office communities of like-minded coworkers whom they don’t actually work with, but rather, they work alongside in order to “cross-pollinate.”

This cross-pollination comes in many forms, from the informal, water-cooler conversations about the last episode of Battlestar Galactica to intensive lunch meetings about bookkeeping for freelancers, and from quickly troubleshooting a Google Calendar feature to collaborating on events and projects. For example, while New Work City hosts regular workshops for technology entrepreneurs, it is also a hub for Open Government meetings.

In late January, on a trip to Kansas City to meet with the Kauffman Foundation, I stumbled into a Panera Bread directly across from my eco-friendly hotel in order to get some lunch within hours after landing. After devouring a bowl of chicken soup in one corner of the nearly-empty restaurant, I noticed two women and a man poised in front of their laptops with a small pink rectangle sign on the table that announced “Creative Club” in large letters and “Jelly” in smaller letters underneath.

Panera Bread, Kansas City. Photo: Laura Forlano

Jelly, founded by Amit Gupta and Luke Crawford in New York in February 2006, is a semiweekly casual coworking event that typically meets at someone’s apartment. It was only their second meeting, but nonetheless, to the surprise of the Kansas City group (a graphic designer, a public relations professional and a sustainable design consultant), I instantly recognized their effort and documented it as part of the larger coworking phenomenon. I presented it the following day at Kauffman.

In his work on social innovation and creative communities, Italian designer Ezio Manzini, presenting as part of the Stephan Weiss Visiting Lectureship at Parsons in early May, makes the point that small, locally-based initiatives such as co-housing have an unprecedented ability to scale globally. As such, the local is no longer an isolated, provincial village that seeks to return to the past but rather a connected cosmopolitanism according to Manzini.

In search of these small but scalable social innovations, our group squeezed onto the B train to Newkirk Avenue in Brooklyn where we visited Ditmas Workspace, a coworking community for writers and researchers located on a “Am I really in Brooklyn, New York?” street lined with large Victorian houses garnished with expansive flowerbeds and trees. Interestingly, Victorian houses are not subject to the zoning requirements that separate residential and office uses of the built environment. This has allowed the 12 members of Ditmas Workspace, half of which are full-time employees working remotely and half of which are freelancers, to create an affordable workspace of like-minded colleagues in the neighborhood where they also live and raise their young children.

Ditmas Workspace. Photo: Liena Zagare

Liena Zagare, an urban planner who founded the Ditmas space in September 2008, emphasized the benefits of the cross-fertilization of ideas and the synergies that take place in the community as well as the need to separate “quiet work” like writing with “loud work” such as doing phone interviews, which they do through the designation of specific rooms for these dissimilar activities.

Our next stop was to Treehouse Coworking, a community for designers in downtown Brooklyn. There, Matt Tyson, a sustainable furniture designer at EcoSystems, which is currently located on the 4^th floor, guided us through all 7 floors of the building. We climbed top to bottom one cold, dark and dusty stair after another since we had exceeded the elevator’s carrying capacity. The building is completely and meticulously filled with art, objects, antique furniture, old mattresses and junk collected over 27 years by the owner. In describing his motivations for opening the Treehouse space to the coworking community in January 2009, Tyson said, “I want to be surrounded by really smart people…I have a strong affinity for community.” Treehouse will soon be offering classes at their woodshop in order to train people interested in learning new hands-on skills, a boon in the ailing knowledge economy.

Treehouse NYC. Photo: Matt Tyson

All this talk of cross-pollination and social innovation throughout the day recalled a very different experience that I’d had several weeks earlier while away at a Pervasive Computing conference in Japan. While I had survived the rigorous one-hour swine flu quarantine procedure resembling a scene from The X-Files complete with men in green cover-ups, goggles and masks that scanned the passengers with a thermo-sensing camera, I had failed to reserve a hotel with Internet access.

While at the Asakusa Shrine in Tokyo, I noticed that I was dangerously close to the limit on the 20 MB data plan on my iPhone 3G and sought out the nearest Internet “café” (if one could call it that). I would, I had decided, call AT&T on Skype in order to upgrade to a bigger data plan. However, upon entering, I was told by the attendant at the counter that I was not allowed to make calls while in the café. In addition, only one person was allowed to accompany each laptop computer into the space.

Coworking is rapidly emerging as a meme for the reorganization of knowledge. Rather than spaces for mobile work, it is well-known that many of Japan’s Internet cafes are, in effect, living spaces for the country’s unemployed youth who have taken to holing up in private Internet cubicles about the size of an English telephone booth but without the distinctive red paint. The 24-hour cafes come equipped with instant ramen and vending machines, rows of pink comic books and showers; they even sell toiletry sets containing combs and shower caps for 160 yen in the women’s restroom so that their guests can freshen up in the morning.

But, rather than sites for community, collaboration and innovation (though I can’t claim that these qualities are completely absent after only a one hour visit), the spaces remain absolutely silent and devoid of social interaction, perhaps so as to not disturb the patrons that are sleeping? In the end, I found – to my utter surprise – that AT&T had finally created a page that allowed me to add and remove international data plan features without suffering through a redundant twenty minute conversation with a customer service representative. Problem solved, and without uttering a single word.

Back to Brooklyn. We ended the day, which was actually quite exhausting after all of the stairs at the Treehouse space, at The Change You Want To See Gallery in Williamsburg. Again, the conversation shifted to the importance of opening their space to coworking as a way of enabling collaboration on media interventions by artists and activists.

The Change You Want To See gallery. Video: Not an Alternative.

As we redesign our cities with these emergent open source models for the reorganization of knowledge / work in mind, we might ask ourselves about the changing nature of our relationship to our work that is reshaping our identities, loyalties and communities. In the future, New Yorkers won’t ask “What do you do?” over pints of German beer and currywurst in the East Village but rather “Where do you work?” Rather than merely a place to do work, the choice of a like-minded coworking community with the right amount of diversity and exposure to new skills and ideas could be as important as choosing a neighborhood to live in.

Laura Forlano is Kauffman Fellow in Law at Yale Law School. Her research interests include mobile and wireless technology, the role of space/place in communication, collaboration and innovation, entrepreneurship, organizational behavior, and science and technology studies.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

We, Jennifer Broutin and Carmen Trudell, started working together while studying in Columbia University’s Advanced Architectural Design program. We had an idea for a class project that we believed could be more than just a rendering in the end-of-the-year show. We were thinking about sustainable energy harvesting, specifically in the form of converting small amounts of human energy into electricity.

CONCEPTION
We began research in David Benjamin and Soo-In Yang’s “Living Architecture” class at Columbia University. At the time, we did not realize the impact this class would have on our work in terms of our continued partnership, our dedication to sustainable design strategies, and the methodological approach of rapid research and prototyping; these principles formed the seed for a collaborative entity that we now call fluxxlab.

We realized how powerful, both literally and figuratively, it is for people to interact with the environment in a participatory way.

The main task for the class was to come up with a responsive kinetic system using sensors, micro-controllers, and shape memory alloys that could create an interactive environment. Our project took a different stance on this charge. We immediately recognized the beauty of this type of environment, but also realized that the ubiquitous integration of embedded systems and reactive surfaces would also mean another ubiquitous energy drain. In other words, designing walls, windows, and floors that breath, move, and respond means that these building elements require electricity to power them. Instead of sticking to the class brief, we proposed to harness wasted energy already present in buildings in order to power our classmate’s projects. We went through a series of investigations into how to mine energy from food waste (chemical), excess heat from computers, or hot/cold water piping (thermal), and opening and closing of doors/windows (mechanical). In the end, mechanical harnessing was the most fruitful and we liked the notion that the user had to “donate” his or her energy and become involved in the process.

We chose Lerner Hall at Columbia as a test site for our prototype. The idea was to compare the number of Calories purchased by students in the café with the number of Calories burned to open the café doors, and then determine the amount of electricity that could be harvested from this action. We literally counted the number of times the doors opened in a day, and repeatedly bothered the café manager for records of their inventory and sales, and then assigned Caloric values to both the food and the action. We weren’t just interested in calculations though, we also wanted (and had to as a requirement of the class) to build a working prototype of an energy harvesting door. The resulting project, the Door Dynamo, was a half-scale door that employed a hacked hand-crank flashlight with an integrating gear and door closer. When the door was opened, the dynamo would harness kinetic energy, convert it to electricity, and then distribute it to a small LED display that would tell the user about their energy input and output. Though we were not able to harness enough energy to power all of our classmate’s projects, we learned some very important tools during the process.

Door Dynamo and diagram of component parts

IDEA GENESIS
Graduation brought many changes in our professional lives as we both took full-time jobs with architecture firms in New York City (which were easier to come by in those days), and also brought the opportunity to take the next step in development of our energy harvesting research. While the Door Dynamo did work, the energy output was too small; we wanted to scale-up the idea – a type of urban turbine that harnesses the energy from a predictable and steady flow within the city, namely the flow of pedestrians. Our goal was to design and fabricate a proof-of-concept revolving door that would successfully harvest a useful amount of energy and make the process visible to the users.

We conceived the Revolution Door as a modified revolving door comprised of three parts – a redesigned central core replacing that of any existing or new revolving door, a mechanical/electrical system that harnessed human energy and redistributed electricity to an output, and an output device that mapped the harnessed energy. We also realized how powerful, both literally and figuratively it is for people to interact with their environment in a participatory way so that they are aware of their impact on their surroundings. Collective action, through the use of the door, was an important factor toward the success of the system – the more people use the door, the more energy can be harnessed. Towards this end, we believe that the systems should be transparent and easily seen to promote understanding of the process.

The Revolution Door project began late 2006, the same year Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” thrust the topic of sustainability into common household banter. Our idea was validated by public interest in energy, and was made feasible by the invention of low energy actuators such as LEDs and microprocessors. The project found an audience because it embodied the general change in the way designers and end-users were thinking about energy production and storage. The timing was perfect. And when it wasn’t perfect, we adapted the narrative and the investigation to make it work.

Axonometric diagram of Revolution Door

TIME AND MONEY
Building a full-scale revolving door prototype required funding and space. We spent the summer after graduation applying for a NYSERDA grant, a Graham Foundation Grant, and an Eyebeam Grant. We were fortunate to receive the Artist in Residency grant from Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in NYC in the Fall of 2006 which granted $5,000 and more importantly gave us a large space to work along with access to a full shop and a laser cutter and 3D printer. With these tools and funding we were set for the next year of work.

We learned the importance of being resourceful, of rooting out possibilities and also of refusing those that are not advantageous to our path.

The following year we were awarded a collaborative grant with Natalie Jeremijenko by NYU Sustainability Fund. We also received private funding from organizations such as Guestroom 2010 who sponsored the design and fabrication of a door to be shown in the HITEC convention in Austin, Texas. For this show we developed the Powerslide prototype, which turns the sliding motion of common building components such as doors, windows, and drawers into a source of energy. We also received an invitation to present our work in Milan for the Well-Tech Award in 2009. We had to consider the time schedule, cost, benefit, and whether we could pull it off to our standards. We learned the importance of being resourceful, of rooting out possibilities and also of refusing those that are not advantageous to our path. It is important to determine whether an option affords opportunity or loss, and to take calculated risks.

Fluxxlab currently works in a collaborative faculty research space at CUNY’s New York City College of Technology (City Tech) campus where Carmen teaches. This is our first experience with institutional support. Through the College we have also been able to work with student interns, faculty from other departments, and secure small grants to promote travel and exhibition of the work.

Unfortunately, time and money are not infinite. All of the work that we have done has been on our own time, on our own terms. We work at night, on weekends or any time that we can spare to move these ideas forward, and as the projects gain more and more momentum we determine how to manage the time, what effort can be put into the endeavor and how we will make ends meet to bring these ideas to fruition. Several times we started to write a business plan which would help us make decisions about which risks to take and how to manage our resources. Because of our busy lives, and general desire to spend our time making things, we still haven’t finished this crucial task. We do think making a plan for where you want to go is very important though, or else how will you ever know when you get there?

Rendering of Powerslide device for installation at Guestroom 2010 in Austin Texas.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
The Eyebeam residency opened our eyes to the world of open source, where people from different cultures and professions come to share ideas openly. We launched the fluxxlab website to share the work that we are doing with a wider community. The website not only documents the projects and press, but also blogs the process of how these ideas came to fruition. Revealing too much information can be harmful at times. You should only broadcast information and methods that you’re completely willing to let go of. Patents protect intellectual property, but are geared toward corporate entities that can afford the legal fees. They also do not encourage the transmission of ideas. The open source movement and creative commons provides an alternative for the small-scale entrepreneur, allowing ideas to be disseminated and proliferated. While these methods provide some degree of protection, creators do not benefit monetarily (unless indirectly) from the intellectual property that they develop.

The methodological approach of rapid research and prototyping that the Living Architecture class introduced us to remained important to our research; a method that David and Soo-in now call “flash research“. The goal of flash research is to prove cheaply and quickly that your idea is feasible. We are not mechanical or electrical engineers, or fabricators, but we learned enough through the internet and will even shamefully admit to buying and reading Electronics for Dummies in order to complete a series of proof-of-concept prototypes of the Revolution Door. We were able to learn how to do-it-ourselves because others freely shared their knowledge on-line. Therefore, we thought it prudent to add to this body of knowledge by adding our research and insights to the freely available knowledge. Had we not been open with our research, we would not have garnered the response from creative minds around the world and the media attention that has helped to push these ideas farther than we ever imagined.

Early prototype of custom generator

CLIENTS & COMMUNICATION
While we like to think that we work entirely on our own terms, we have on occasion taken fee-based design projects for clients. These projects are either a typical architectural space design, or an energy harvesting device commissioned for a specific event or installation such as the Powerslide installation at the Guestroom 2010 show mentioned above, or the personal powerPlant for an Alternative Energy workshop at Eyebeam. This income is then put back into fluxxlab for creating new projects, which in turn draw clients who are interested in these ideas. The ideas of fluxxlab serve as the branding for the firm and funding is sought primarily for ideas that are already on the table. Largely, fluxxlab works from idea generation, prototyping and then marketing to draw interest in the project or fluxxlab as a firm.

The timing was perfect. And when it wasn’t perfect, we adapted the narrative and the investigation to make it work.

This is not to say that we do not pursue clients. If we create a prototype that we believe would work well within a setting, we will make a proposal to a particular group. It is then up to the client whether or not to work with us on it. As architects, we normally wait for the client to hire us based on a resume of talents and past accomplishments. Often architects seek creative freedom through design competitions or academia. If we position ourselves as inventors however, we then have all the creative freedom in the world. If your idea is good enough and you set yourself to convincing others of this, then you will find people to publish and fund your work. A friend of ours who was awarded a Graham Foundation grant told us that his group applied three times for the same grant before finally being awarded the money. It takes lots of time, and many applications and reapplications. After applying for the NYSERDA grant and having our application declined, we asked them how to improve our future attempts. Most grant reviewing boards keep the jury notes and are happy to share that information with you if you ask.

The contacts and relationships we have established, whether through grants, clients or collaborators have been extremely important in pushing our work forward. We have had the good fortune to work with a variety of insightful and inspired people in the fields of design, engineering, and fabrication. We constantly work within the academic and professional arena to learn from our colleagues and friends who only add to our pool of knowledge. It is incredibly important to work with, support and promote those around you with good ideas.

FUTURE
Fluxxlab has been working on energy harvesting for three years now. The result of that body of work is a collection of prototypes, exhibitions, renderings, serveral web and print publications, and our web page. We still feel that the work should be practically deployed in the world; we still think it’s a good idea, although we are admittedly fatigued and at times discouraged. There are logistical hurdles to face when making the leap from the gallery to the user, such as whether to incorporate or not, what are the tax and insurance ramifications, how much time can we reasonably dedicate, and when is fabrication beyond our limitations.

Our interest in the Revolution Door project has gone through iterations. We realize that we are not and do not wish to be a door manufacturing company that puts this product into production. But, we see the potential in this idea becoming a standard within the building industry, and dream about the potential of such an endeavor. Imagine for a moment that for every office lobby in midtown, a revolution door both contributed to a decentralized power grid where buildings are responsible for energy production while simultaneously encouraging greater energy literacy on the part of consumers by turning them into micro-producers.

The Revolution Door is a simple idea that can have a great impact on how we as a society consume and produce energy. There are many good ideas out there, of which the Revolution Door is only one. How can we organize as a community of designers and inventors to bring our ideas forward, sharing resources, ideas and feedback in order to bring these ideas to life?

Rendering of Revolution Door with output to LED device detailing output over time.

Fluxxlab’s Revolution Door has been featured in the past on the web, in print, and on TV:

ubergizmo: Fluxxlab Offers Revolution Door (February 2009)

Discovery Planet Green G Word series: episode “LA Without a Car” (April 2008)

AIA New York Chapter eOculus newsletter: Breathing Facades, Energy Carts for Dead Cell Phones Featured in Feedback Show (April 2008)

NY Sun: Art Science Comes Alive at Eyebeam (March 2008)

Treehugger: Feedback Exhibit Merges Ecological Tech and Art (March, 2008)

Gizmodo: Fluxxlab Revolution Door is Eco-Friendly, People-Powered Power Station (February 2008)

regeneration: The Revolution Door (February 2008)

techchee: Revolution door: A revolving door that generates power for the building where it’s installed! (February 2008)

ecogeek: Revolution Door Captures Human Power (February 2008)

Inhabitat: Generate Energy with Fluxxlab’s ‘Revolution’ Revolving Door” (February 2008)

Revolution Door was featured in the Discovery Science Channel Invention Nation series, Episode 9 “Power Surge (October 2007)

Metropolis Magazine: The Mother of Invention (August 2006)

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

While purging my apartment in a stoop sale extravaganza, I met one of my neighbors for the first time. One year had passed before our paths finally crossed and, in a matter of minutes, she schooled me on the history of our block and how community boards work. What did my other thousand neighbors know? And how could I reach out to all of them?

Residents are brimming with local knowledge, from the trivial to the empowering: the best slice of pizza, the nearest place to donate clothes, the latest news on the power outage, the lowdown on yesterday’s community board meeting. All of these fragments of local information are dispersed amongst a population within a defined area, and lots of people would benefit from the knowledge and resources of others.

However, we’re currently limited in our ability to communicate with our collective neighborhood and as a result, this wealth of knowledge remains largely untapped. Without sharing, residents live in an area that functions as little more than a giant hotel of passing strangers. Forums for collective communication can transform neighborhoods into extensive information networks. “The denser such networks in a community,” says Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, “the more likely that its citizens will be able to cooperate for mutual benefit.” Empowerment from within!

It’s hard not to spot a flyer while walking around New York City. People post their messages in the interstitial spaces of the City, and lampposts have become unofficial billboards for local communication.

But citizens’ flyers are illegal while businesses can shout about their latest products on an increasing number of public surfaces. Makes you think whether public space can be better designed so that it’s not necessarily allocated to the highest bidder but instead reflects and facilitates the needs of communities.

So it’s time to get more critical of how public space can be used and improved. For one, how can our public spaces be better places for sharing information? How can we harness the collective knowledge of a neighborhood? Let’s start with a question that’s on every New Yorker’s mind:

Inspired by Illegal Art’s 2007 To Do installation, where blank Post-it notes covered storefront windows for open responses from passers-by…

I riffed off that for my public art project I’ve Lived: Post-it Notes for Neighbors which invited local residents and other passers-by to share information about their living situation. It was part of Windows Brooklyn, a week-long exhibition in June 2008 where artists were paired with storefronts in Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill.

Post-it notes were arranged on the window of Yesterday’s News, a vintage furniture store.

Each note was stamped with the same fill-in-the-blank sentence: “I’ve Lived in a ___-br apartment in _____ for ___ years now and it cost(s) _____!”

During the week it was up, people could fill out the forms with their own information…

…and balk at the high and low numbers paid by others.

By the end of the week, 151 notes (about half) were filled out and the window was transformed into a useful collection of personal notes created by and relevant to the community. 52 responses came from people living in one-bedroom apartments in Carroll Gardens, where monthly rent ranged from $350 to $2700. The winner of Cheapest Apartment goes to someone living in a studio in Carroll Gardens for 43 years that costs $146! And the Most Expensive Award goes to someone in a four-bedroom in Cobble Hill for 4 years that costs $3,720.

Brooklyn resident Deborah bought 3 homes in Bedford Stuyvesant from 1988-2003 and never paid more than $250,000. They put her two sons through college and will allow her to retire early. “Like they say,” she said, “they’re not making any more of it. Get yourself some real estate!”

Here are some graphs of the results. To see more, go here. Of course the final solution is probably not Post-it notes, but it’s a low-budget start. How can we improve the mediums – physical boards, kiosks, websites, mobile applications – for collectively sharing local information? John Thackara, author of In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World, says it well: “Design does not take place in a situation; it is the situation. As planners, designers, and citizens, we need to rethink our spaces, places, and communities in order to better exploit the dynamic potential of networked collaborations.” How can we better design the situations in which this can happen?

Here’s some other fun public art projects that have inspired me over the years:

Rebar’s PARK(ing) that turns urban parking spaces into temporary parks
True’s emotional subway stickers that made NYC commutes a more thoughtful affair
Natalie Jeremijenko’s Feral Robotic Dogs that sniff out chemical contamination
Eve Mosher’s High Water Line that marked NYC’s floodline with a physical chalk mark
Free Soil’s FRUIT wrappers that drop knowledge on the energy it took to deliver your orange

Read a response to Post-It Notes for Neighbors by Rachel Abrams.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.