- Designing for Mixed Envelopes, Mixed Programs
Toward drafting that matrix of mixed envelopes as part of the design brief for The Stack, we may want to consider our own thought experiment: half of all architects and urbanists in the world should, as of now, stop designing new buildings and new developments altogether. Instead they invest their training into the design and programming of software that provides for the better use of structures and systems we already have. It is a simple matter of good content management. The other half, the control group, may continue as before. Very likely the first group, steered toward virtual envelopes, would quickly focus their attention on mobile handsets. Their design brief might state that the essential function of the city is proximity — to people, markets, goods, transport, information — and that the handset condenses the City itself into a remote control apparatus. For ambulant bodies moving through active world, the handset is part of an active network linking site to speech and data and gesture to affect. <sup>10</sup> Mobile device plus city equals a composite read-write medium, allowing for real-time communication, linking a User not only to the City layer of The Stack but to the Cloud infrastructures that provide the cheap vapor of on-demand computation as translated through the little glass screen. Its immediate functions can be modified in relation to App platforms that transform the same machine from handheld telephony into a homing beacon, high-definition video camera, music collection, Geiger counter, magic antenna, virtual goggles, scanning X-ray filter, field recording microphone, medical monitor, or magic window that makes invisible things appear. Ambient urban networks become in-hand animations with which to communicate with (or at) immediate and remote environments. This changes not just how people interact with cities but how they see them as well. With the release of the first iPhone in 2007, a critical mass of Users could envision interaction-in-the-wild as a new genre of computing, not as a variation on a desktop or telephone experience but instead a personal interface to ambient sights, sounds, and words. This would change how people see the device at hand. The shift from point-and-click to multi-touch gesturing represents a kind of substantialization of data, now embodied in tangible interfaces activating a living infor mation substance that you directly grab and manipulate. Enclosed in sensate glass, an onyx frame of immanence, the device interface and hardware blend into what the User takes to be a single dynamic form or field. Older genres of GUI offer menus and contextual options but rely on an instrumental distance between signifier and signified; with iPhone, the mobile interface became filled with things more than with metaphors for things. Couched in a face-like shell and illuminated from within, Apps possess a prehensile tangibility to be pushed and pulled as organic, rubbery stuff. This tangibility and anthropomorphology are what make this apparatus work, socially and psychologically, as an urban interface, making it seem to link not virtually into a deferred realm of the iconic, but directly to the physical world itself.
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City Layer