Dead Media & The Flavour of Cities The meme is the message A discussion led by Thomas Purves http://opencities.ca http://thomaspurves.com Open Cities Conference, Toronto, 2007

Two Modern Spaces

WTF?

WTF?

Mediums behave like memes In that they propagate by their own rules. Proppaging through society like waves

Forces of Media: economics game theory snowball effects innovation culture choice -can you name others? -

Catch: Any new media always obsolesces an old

dead media always has some particular flavor, some character that is always lost

Dead flavours are also an opportunity. Retrieval.

Dead flavour

Sometimes we miss old flavours

Sometimes we don’t The black death as a flavour of medieval cities.

Cars! e.g. Long lasting and unexpected flavours implications

Good Freedom, mobility, picking up chicks.

Externalities are also flavours Bad

Ugly

Just Arbitrary There’s many slightly arbitrary ways to design a streetlight

Debatable

The Region of Awesome The Zone of the Possible

Changes in Media reshape the zone of the possible The Region of Awesome The Zone of the Possible

Flavour Shift The Region of Awesome The Zone of the Possible 1890 The Zone of the Possible 2007

Further Complications Land of Suck The Region of Awesome The Zone of the Possible (great sea of indifference)

Flavour loss of the industrial age.

Rising costs of labour Rising costs of craftmanship Prefabrication and standardization bring advantages at the cost of flavour (how much has this affected our culture’s sense of aesthetic?)

What flavours will “Open” bring?

Complimentary 3D House Printing Side effects? Nothing has to be prefab. Organic designs. Changing the shape of the possibility space

Emergence is a flavour of open design

Quality or Crap?

Discussion

Carbon-trading system for ugly? Managing Flavour