Hi! I’m Adam Greenfield. Over the last twelve years, I’ve spent quite a lot of time thinking about the interaction of people, urban place, and technology, in my book Everyware, at my various jobs, and in most detail at my blog, Speedbird. For this year’s FutureEverything, I’ve been asked to curate a collection of urbanist iPhone applications under the rubric of “Serendipity Apps.”
Serendipity doesn’t simply mean “surprise.” Strictly speaking, the word means accidentally discovering something wonderful in the course of a search for something unrelated. The genuine occurrence of serendipity necessarily implies a very powerful order of richness and texture in the world and, to my mind anyway, when you experience it in cities it’s a clear indicator of a healthily functioning urban ecosystem.
Given that the essence of serendipity is its unexpectedness, I tend to be wary of products and services that promise to enhance or “accelerate” it. Accordingly, in this particular selection, I’ve taken a rather loose read on just what constitutes the quality. I’m looking for applications or frameworks that offer residents and other users of the city an instant read on the state of things, a read that allows them to change their behavior in response to evolving conditions or to take advantage of unexpected juxtapositions, however momentary.
Just now, these are the sort of interventions I believe most likely to mesh with the way cities already work (and most of us already know how to use them). But who knows what comes a little further out, once the way we do citying has had a little time to evolve, and to take account of the mobile, networked, location-based reality we know inhabit? If we learn anything at all from having experienced serendipity, it’s not merely to expect but to cherish the unexpected — the ruptures in routine from which all novelty flows. And if we use them consciously and well, the following thirteen applications can present us with just such ruptures.
This year’s Serendipity Apps contenders:
- NYCWAY and Everyblock
I imagine that the developers of NYCWAY, in entering New York City’s Big Apps contest, took one look at all of the potential data sources available for them to draw upon and said, “What the hell! We’ll have them all!”
There’s no getting around the fact that the application is kind of a mess. There’s little enough visual clarity or hierarchy to it; it’s like nothing so much as a Web portal circa ‘99, updated for the mobile and the age of location-specific data. That said, though, NYCWAY is tremendously useful, putting an absurd wealth of information literally at your fingertips, from the usual traffic and crime data to the location of street-food carts and public restrooms. It’s even got a location-based listing of restaurant inspections and health-code violations — so much for my formerly-favorite curry house! If you’re looking for a set of mobile tools to help you act on data and respond to emergent conditions, I can’t imagine anything more comprehensive than this app.
Now: Everyblock. I’ve long been a champion of the pioneering “hyperlocal news portal” and neighborhood-based data site. They were among the very first to take location-specific municipal data and present it to ordinary citizens in a way that made sense, and in many ways they remain the best, even among the thicket of other contenders that have shown up in the subsequent years.
Their mobile app, though, frankly leaves a lot to be desired. It’s like a much-better looking but harder to use version of NYCWAY. Why have I bothered to include it here? Because for all its difficulty in use (and what could possibly be a more infuriating way to present data than a list of postal codes in non-sequential order?), it’s just rife with the kind of thoughtful little design touches that other applications routinely neglect. Combine the aesthetic detail of Everyblock with the total reach and subject-specific navigation of NYCWAY, and I’d wager you’d have a real start on the future of hyperlocal interaction.
- Asborometer
In my talks and writing, I frequently argue that “data” in and of itself is seductive, its dynamic visualization more so, and that we need to be very careful that we don’t get drawn into real-world decisions based on such visualizations without due reflection. But for the fact that it didn’t exist yet, I could have been speaking specifically about Asborometer.
Through the magic of the iPhone SDK, Asborometer brings a set of very dubious statistics into gorgeously plausible life, presenting them to you as graphs, heatmaps, leaderboards (!), even a temperature reading of your current location. (I bet you didn’t know that the Borough of Camden was a full 26.9% antisocial.) I can easily enough see Asborometer changing people’s behavior. I just don’t like to imagine the form those changes are likely to take.
- SpotCrime NYC
Leafing through SpotCrime’s listings is a little like reading the Police Blotter section newspapers used to feature. (For whatever reason, my own favorite was always the one in the South China Morning Post — Hong Kong’s incidents were so much more vivid to me.) And while it’s heir to some of the same issues about the seduction of data I worry about when confronted with an artifact like Asborometer, here you can drill down to the actual reports.
And in some obscure but important way, that seems to make all the difference. The distinction is between an abstract fear on the one hand, given apparent substance by its inscription in seemingly authoritative numbers, charts and graphs — and the actual texture of street crime on the other, in all its tawdry, banal and occasionally appalling isness. You’re likely to have much more of a sense of agency when confronted with particulars than you would against inchoate percentages. And agency, as far as I’m concerned, is the name of the game.
- Grindr
It had to happen eventually: a tool to help you find not Mr. Right, but Mr. Right Now. I rather admire Grindr for braving the obvious criticisms — that it’s shallow, plays right into stereotypes about gay sexuality, even that it will drive the spread of STDs — because I imagine it’s very nice indeed to be struck by a certain kind of impulse and find that its fulfillment is currently a mere 463 feet away.
It may encapsulate everything traditionalist societies fear and hate about the decadent West, but Grindr (and the equivalents for women and for straight men that are bound to follow in its footsteps) will change the way courtship works forever.
- Foursquare
By superimposing game-like mechanics over the activities and behaviors of everyday life, the developers of Foursquare have found an entirely new way to motivate behavior most of us probably enjoy a great deal to begin with: going out, hitting nightspots, meeting friends…getting crunked.
I can tell you from experience that the check-in dynamic — and especially the thrill of being named a venue’s Mayor by dint of frequent custom — drives more exuberant socialization more often. I can also tell you that the thrill eventually fades, as, indeed, the current spike of interest in Foursquare may well do. But while it lasts, Foursquare has to be recognized as that rarest of digital technologies that enhances rather than undercuts what cities are for and already do well.
- Infomaps Amsterdam
One of the dynamics I’m most fascinated by in the popular embrace of emergent technologies is how quickly something that would have been inconceivably magical two years ago comes to feel banal and ordinary. So admittedly, if you’ve got an iPhone and you’re interested in cities, by now there’s not much about Infomaps Amsterdam that’s likely to strike you as revelatory. I offer it for your consideration mainly because it’s among the nicest and best-considered apps of its type…just an unfolding graphical feast that’s eminently worthy of the lovely city to which it provides an interface.
- WalkBrighton
As lovely as it is, the notable innovation of WalkBrighton isn’t anything inherent to the app itself, and therefore a little bit difficult for you to experience here in Manchester unless you’ve just come straight from the seaside town. What makes WalkBrighton special is that in its cartography and visual design, it uses all the same cues of the physical signage and wayfinding program actually installed in the lanes, streets, stations and parks.
That’s the kind of canny detail that’s truly going to help people integrate the information they derive from their mobile devices with that they get from their own immersion in a given place. It’s a very insightful choice that clearly points the way toward a humanely-designed networked urban future.
- Nike True City
Truly memorable urban experiences are like Soylent Green: they’re made of people. For all the heavy-handed brandedness of Nike’s locative app, its developers seem to have understood this. True City isn’t just a guide to the city, it’s someone in particular’s guide to their city. Whether you respond to it well or not will depend on how closely your tastes, desires and predilections map to the “tastemaker” that Nike’s invited to rep their hometown, but either way it’s a welcome departure from the generic, averaged-out cities mass data scrapes tend to gift us with.
There are some gestures here toward letting “civilians” populate the maps from the bottom up, but they feel half-hearted to me, as if giving anybody but the appointed cadre a real voice in this thing would somehow queer the achingly subcultural aura of hipness so overridingly important to Nike. The truly revolutionary thing, of course, would be an app that let each of us be a tastemaker…but I leave the realization of such a thing as an exercise for the intrepid developer.
- Pachube DataLogger
The hugely ambitious Pachube project is one of those things that’s almost easier to use than it is to explain. It’s like a gigantic, global switchboard for distributed informational inputs (mostly embedded sensors) and outputs (generally visualizations and graphs, but also the state of other networked systems). The DataLogger application lets you function as an input, by entering a data reading of most any sort along with the time and place at which it was gathered.
Its appearance as an iPhone app strikes me as one of the clearest signs yet that there’s some reality to the so-called Internet of Things theorists and boffins keep insisting is on the horizon…and a very concrete and accessible step toward making this abstraction practically useful to ordinary people in the course of their everyday lives.
- Nearest Tube
To be blunt, I tend to think augmented-reality (AR) applications are a bit flavor-of-the-month — and this despite having been an enthusiast of the AR idea for going on ten years now. Nearest Tube takes the same approach to urban orientation that one of the Legible London projects does: rather than a comprehensive wayfinding solution that tells you how to get from A to B (and more or less drags you there by the hand), Nearest Tube does just what it says on the tin.
Stopping in your tracks, glancing up and being shown the very nearest portal into that time- and space-folding technology we call the Underground? That’s a proposition I can endorse. That it’s done so with such aesthetic refinement and respect of spatiality is the cherry on top, especially in AR, a competitive space where most interfaces, and certainly the ones that grab the attention of the Gizmodo crowd, look as though they were designed for surface-to-air missile launchers.
- Museum of the Phantom City
To my mind, in all the millions of words that have been written about psychogeography down through the years, there’s nothing that comes as close to defining the word as this poetic little application.
At first blush, it’s merely an inventory of visionary architectural projects planned for New York City over the past 150 years or so. The wrinkle is that the application loads for the first time with each project hidden from view, and you can only unlock them one by one, which you do by visiting its intended site. This gives you the chance to imagine the impact of each on the environment you’re actually moving through, and the sort of things you’d be experiencing and feeling if it had in fact been completed. It’s a brilliant use of locational technology to immerse the user in the experience of alterity and, by contemplating what might have been, provoke hard questions about what is and what might yet be to come.
- Google Maps
Be it ever so humble, the native Google Maps application that ships with the iPhone has done more to underwrite actual urban serendipity than anything else I’ve ever used. It has absolutely no glamour to it, not even the dorky, cut-rate thing that passes for glamour in the tech-smitten world of mobile devices. But it has utterly changed the way I use cities, both my own and those I visit.
It orients me, which leaves me feeling safe enough that I can take some risks and explore. It sends me down streets I never would have essayed, gives me a sense of scale and scope and permeability, and generally helps me reckon with place in all of its nuances and particulars. Again, it’s one of those things which gives its users a god’s-eye capability which would have seemed all but inconceivable only a very few years ago, but which we’ve already come to regard as table stakes…just the price of admission to the locative media circus. How about a little love for this all-too-often overlooked powerhouse?