Last week I launched @SutMobLib, a Twitter account that tweets the location of Sutton’s mobile library in real time. No, I’m not sitting here all day sending messages. A program does that automatically. Every time the library gets to a new stop it posts up its location.

@SutMobLib on Bing Maps Twitter Search

The utility of such a thing isn’t immediately obvious. While I don’t like to generalise or assume too much, I suspect that the vast majority of mobile library users don’t use Twitter. So far a grand total of nine  people have signed up to follow @SutMobLib and most of those are various sock puppets of mine.

@SutMobLib on Tweetie 2 "nearby search" for iPhone

Unlike most Twitter accounts that belong to real people, @SutMobLib isn’t great for conversation. It’s even less intelligent and interactive than it looks. Anyone that wants to be reminded when the library is visiting their neighbourhood would be better off just putting the relevant day in their calendar.

@SutMobLib is useful because Twitter is now more than just a social network connecting people. It’s become a platform for realtime geospatial information, where things like the mobile library can post up what they’re doing and where they’re doing it, as they’re doing it.

Experienced Twitter users know that while half the power of Twitter is following people you’re interested in and conversing with them, the other half is reading realtime searches for keywords, phrases and hashtags. Recently, Twitter enhanced the power of its search by allowing members to post up their precise geographical location with each tweet, which other members can then discover by searching around an area rather than around a hashtag or topic.

So Twitter has become a radar. Tweetie 2, a Twitter client for the iPhone, allows users to search “Nearby” based on the user’s current location and shows a map covered with plotted tweets. Web users can do something similar using Bing Maps’ Twitter Search. The popular client TweetDeck shows pop-up maps underneath geotweets.

Realtime geospatial search brings a new dimension to finding out about the world. For the first time we can pull up live information about a place, whether that’s people’s conversations and observations or the solipsistic self-reporting of things that tweet like Sutton’s mobile library. Various urban annotation and virtual graffiti projects have existed before now but Twitter brings this capability to a mass-market social network with tens of millions of members. Through reading conversations about coffee in Soho or chemo at the Royal Marsden Hospital, our awareness of the world around us just got a great deal broader.

@SutMobLib showing as a geotweet in TweetDeck

For some, that will mean discovering, spontaneously and without specifically searching for it, that a friend — or the mobile library — is around the corner and might be pleased to see us. The world around us is constantly shifting, with opportunities and hazards popping up and then disappearing again, often without leaving a trace. Now we can see those traces. Serendipity is the spice of life and it’s just got a very big helping hand. Fire up your radar.

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Further reading on where ambient intelligence is taking us:

Peter Morville, Ambient Findability
Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground
Adam Greenfield, Everyware

Merton Council are running a consultation called moreMorden until 10 October 2008 on outline proposals for regenerating Morden town centre. What follows is my summary of the main consultation document (PDF) and its supporting fact sheet (PDF). I don’t work for the council, so these are just my words, not my ideas.

Members of the public and local organisations can make their views known via a paper questionnaire (PDF), an online form and unusually, on a moreMorden Facebook group.

Photo of Morden town centre by Charlotte Gilhooly.

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Morden has a lot of potential and a lot of problems. On the upside, it has the Tube station, good bus connections and is reasonably near to the tram. It has good access to nearby parks. It has the potential to build more housing, improve the number, range and quality of the shops and attract other businesses to the town centre.

On the downside, many of the existing town centre buildings and streets are poor quality, outdated and poorly maintained. While many people pass through Morden centre on the way to other places, few stop to shop or use other leisure or social facilities. Few people live in the town centre, while those that live in the surrounding residential neighbourhoods tend to shop, work and socialise elsewhere. Bigger shops and new businesses don’t want to open in Morden because few people use it at present. At the same time, few people use it at present because it doesn’t offer much. It’s a vicious circle.

The council would like to build more and better shops, office space and housing in the town centre. It expects that if more people lived in the town centre it would make Morden an attractive place for shops and other businesses to come. These new town centre residents would be potential customers and workers for the new shops and businesses. Having more people living in the town centre would also provide the opportunity to build better community, cultural and leisure facilities.

As well as new buildings and facilities, the council would also like to improve the quality of the streets by removing clutter (eg. excessive signage, bollards and railings), using better materials for pavements, proving more trees and greenery and installing more attractive benches, signage, lighting and other “street furniture”. The council would also like to improve facilities for pedestrians and cyclists and in places would like to give them priority over motor traffic.

At the moment, the council has an idea of the general direction for future developments and would like members of the the public and local organisations to outline their priorities and suggest any other ideas which the council may have not considered. This feedback is important as the council wants to design for the real needs of local people, not just what it imagines those needs to be.

The issue of the amount of new building development in the town centre is very important. Once the area plan has been decided, the council will invite private property developers to submit plans for each new building or group of buildings. The council is able to make these property developers pay for improvements to the local area as a condition of giving them planning permission for their proposed buildings. The more building the council allows, the more money it will get from the property developers to pay for general street improvements and other facilities to benefit local people. (This process is called “planning obligation” or a “Section 106 agreement“.)

Therefore, the council is asking people both what kinds of facilities they would like locally and how much new building they are happy to see in Morden town centre to pay for those facilities.

Then there were the guerilla benchers, installing street seats where the local authority had been too poor or too mean to do it themselves.

On the web, a growing community of civic hackers has been building sites on top of public information to mash it up in new ways that the publishers hadn’t imagined or didn’t have the means or motive to build.

In digital and physical space, if something can be hacked it will be. People are no longer content to live with what designers give them. As Stewart Brand argues in How Buildings Learn, the end of the formal, official design process isn’t the end of design, it’s just the start of the informal process where the users take over and adapt their spaces to their ever-changing needs.

Within the design profession, the practice of co-design is acknowledging that products are better when the users aren’t just consulted but actually participate in the design process. But this is only half the story. Design is part observation and part clairvoyance, discerning likely future needs from current and past ones. When the scope is limited and familiar — a container to hold liquid temporarily for drinking — one has to try very hard to design badly. When the scope is broad and novel — a cashless and paperless ticketing system for a large urban transport system — the risks of poor systems and rapid obsolescence increase.

This is where the hackers, or guerilla designers, come in. Hackers take a designed system or object and modify it for their own needs, sometimes by changing the thing itself, sometimes by combining it with other things to produce new possibilities. Unpaid and usually unrecognised, the hacker delights in the intellectual challenge and the satisfaction of making something for practical use. Sometimes the results are crude, sometimes elegant. The only true criterion for success is that they work.

Relatively few people have the inclination or opportunity to work as big-D professional designers, but as design tools and the hacker ethic become ever more embedded in the general population, the world is looking a lot more malleable than it used to be.

Where do you want to hack today?

This is The Hamptons — not the real ones on Long Island, New York but a housing development in the south London suburb of Worcester Park.

But as ever there is trouble in paradise, or at least the contemporary spectre we call the fear of crime and “anti-social behaviour”.

Like most new developments, The Hamptons features a mix of tenures, with owner-occupiers holding homes valued up to £800,000, down through tenants in privately-rented properties and social housing tenants.

The curfew at the Hamptons comes courtesy of Twickenham-based Thames Valley Housing which runs the social housing on the estate and is implemented through its tenancy agreements. Parents of children under 15 must ensure that they’re inside after 9pm or risk losing their homes for breaking the terms of their contracts.

As a modern, progressive and socially-conscious organisation, Thames Valley Housing is keen to ensure that its policy and practice avoids prejudice and discrimination:

Thames Valley Housing believes that no person should suffer disadvantage by reason of their race, colour, ethnic or national origin, or because of their religion, gender, sexual orientation, appearance, age, disability or marital status and opposes any discrimination which denies this.

Paradoxically, it sees no conflict between this policy and a requirement of tenancy on the estate that residents under 15 must be indoors after 9pm, in contravention of their legal rights and accepted social norms.

One might expect that such a curfew would meet a fair bit of resistance from the locals, but if the Sutton Guardian is to be believed, many of them quite like it. In fact, not only are the young social housing tenants observing the curfew, but some of the adult residents too. In the words of one local mother:

We all have to be in by 9pm, it’s adults as well. They don’t want people wandering around the estate at night. But it doesn’t really bother me as I’m in by that time anyway.

Another comments that her children aren’t allowed to sit on the grass in groups of more than four because “this could be seen as intimidating”.

Very few people would defend the kind of inconsiderate and malicious misbehaviour that blights many people’s lives, whether it’s vandalism, violence or persistent late-night noise. I’ll oppose those strongly where they happen. But in the rush to be seen to clamp down strongly on “anti-social behaviour” our society seems to have forgotten the nature of society and sociability and thrown the baby out with the bathwater. If this were sex, we’d be advocating chastity as the antidote to rape.

Society and that much abused concept, “community”, arises from people living together, working together, playing together and forming numerous reciprocal relationships at varying degrees of intensity. As we’re not all (yet) a homogeneous mass of automatons, this interaction causes friction. Often this is experienced positively, as new ideas, opportunities and ways of living arrive serendipitously in our lives. Sometimes it’s negative, as others innocently or maliciously transgress our personal and collective boundaries.

In seeking to resolve these conflicts as they inevitably occur, we are forced to answer the perennial question, How should we live? The answers apply to ourselves, of course, as well as those we may consider to have done wrong. Therefore, while addressing the (perceived) misbehaviour of others, we clarify our own responsibilities towards the community and strengthen our own commitment to meet them. The Golden Rule, that we should treat others as we would like to be treated by them, remains paramount.

Using a curfew as a prophylactic against potential disorder ensures that the possibility that the normal functioning of community may be disturbed is replaced by the inevitability that it will be. To prevent people occupying common space and socialising with each other, even passing by and exchanging glances, nods and smiles, reduces the space in which real social relationships are formed and nurtured. Using rules rather than customs imposes values on people rather than allows people’s own values to be expressed. The post-9pm teenager sitting with her friend becomes a deviant and a threat, regardless of the purpose and nature of her conduct.

I’ve long believed that the real cure for disorder on our streets isn’t to scour them clean of humanity, but to fill them up with people of all ages, classes and “lifestyles”, to encourage diverse activities and to promote the notion that we as citizens have equal responsibilities to be tolerable and to tolerate the reasonable behaviour of others. The notion is as old as cities themselves and defines the very essence of citizenship. The alternatives, seen far too often in contemporary Britain, are disconnection, alienation, segregation, mistrust and a paralysing fear that becomes more potent than the feared object itself. We need an anti-curfew that fills our streets with the vast mass of well-behaved and well-intentioned people, rather than just the marginalised few that have no private space to which to retreat. It’s not the presence of bad people that creates disorder but the absence of good ones.

If community is to become a reality rather than a cute marketing euphemism we’ll all need to get out more, not less. The one thing that worries me more than those imposing curfews are the Stepford Wives (and husbands, and children) that blindly follow them, naively hoping that heaven is a quiet house in an empty street where no-one knows your name.

Every year 10,000 gallons of urine is at risk of ending up in the city’s streets and alleyways through irresponsible and anti-social behaviour.

But help is at hand thanks to the new Sat Lav service, which promises to locate the nearest public convenience for a modest 25 pennies:

Just text the word “toilet” to 80097 and you will be texted back with the location and opening hours of your nearest public toilet.

So despite being comfortably ensconced in my well-provisioned Stonecot Hill chambers I decide to give it a go and find the location of my nearest Westminster toilet.

But no, foiled!

Sorry, we cannot locate your current position. Please try again later (Service is not available on Three or Virgin). You have not been charged for this reply.

I wonder if this later is the later when Three and Virgin’s services become compatible with Sat Lav’s system (or vice versa), or the later when I decide to switch my mobile phone network.

Either way, I doubt nature’s call will wait that long.