Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.
Welcome to the Future?
Barclays have launched a combined credit, Oyster and cash payment card for travellers in London (a textbook Greenfield device if ever I saw one). At the moment there are ads for it all over the tube featuring a variety of mocked-up Minority Report-style futurescapes based on present day London. Thanks to Flickr I found that Ned Richards grabbed a couple of snaps of them; he's definitely right that the golf courses aren't as exciting as roller-coasters.
I love this kind of imagery, but my last year of travel has pretty much convinced me that you don't need to mock them up. I haven't been any of the cities that get the most attention for their present day sci-fi realities (Tokyo, Dubai, Shanghai or Singapore), but there are pockets of unevenly distributed future all over the place. Here's a picture I took last week from London's Docklands Light Railway:
And one of the same part of London from the 23rd floor of One Churchill Place:
(apparently it was one of the first skyscrapers to be completed after 9/11 and therefore one with a tough attitude towards security and structure stability, which is good because just over to the right of this photo is London City Airport's runway)
I started thinking about the future-now of Western cities in May when XTech in Paris placed us in a hotel overlooking a tried-and-failed Modernist complex near the Eiffel tower. References to Alphaville were inevitable, the French origins of Parkour were entirely explained.
I'm not the only one taking these snaps though, my friend Adam took this one in Chicago recently. As if the city-scape there isn't sci-fi enough, his phone camera was kind enough to accidentally filtr it into concept territory, just so:
Welcome to the future.
XTech 2007, and visiting London
I'll be back in London in a couple of weeks, on May 18th right after XTech 2007 in Paris where Mike and I will be speaking about visualisations of time.
Some themes/highlights I'm looking forward to from the schedule:
- Aaron Straup Cope (Yahoo/Flickr) and Håkon Wium Lie (Opera) are both talking about paper and printing and the web.
- Blaine Cook (Obvious/Twitter) and Kellan Elliott-McCrea (Yahoo/Flickr) are talking about Jabber (IM) and social software for robots.
- I'm interested to see if Simon Willison can keep up his momentum on OpenID (I'm a skeptic).
- It will be good to catch up with Steve Coast and talk about OpenStreetMap
- Matt Biddulph is (sadly) talking about his work in Second Life but hopefully also about his recent shift to working full-time on Dopplr too.
Registration closes on Tuesday, so if you want to hang out with us, see all that, and hear keynotes from Adam Greenfield, Gavin Starks and Schulze & Webb, you should jump to it and register!
At some point I'm going to stop pretending that I'll write this blog with any regularity. In the meantime, if you're wondering what I'm up to you should know that life in San Francisco is great and that Stamen are treating me very well... If you want to know more you'll just have to grab me face to face, or at least wait for my current project to launch by which point I might find time to breathe. We'll see!
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