Tribal.MX

In Mexico we have a name for the quick fix that will always be the first attempt to repair that old machine, regardless of our lack of knowledge or expertise. “El Jale Chicano” is an institution among people that may not have had any engineering studies or proper training, but are not shy about showcasing their creativity and genius to save themselves a few Pesos to keep operating that old car. If you have been to Mexico City you probably know what I’m talking about.

This is one of the reasons why I think Mexico is poised to be one of the leaders of the growing Maker Movement. Mexicans have the DIY attitude in their blood. They may not have access to all the latest gadgets and techniques, but I think the culture of figuring things out without any institutional support is strong and over time that will prove to be more important.

Whatever the “Steampunk” subculture fantasizes about the Victorian-based future that never was, has nothing on the intricate harsh reality of Mexico’ streets that seem to have inspired scenes from a cyberpunk underworld. Entire shanty-towns wired with the efficiency of the most sophisticated global telecom, except for that institutional obsession with safety.

Yet, I don’t think the Mexican youth is aware of this super-power they all have. This is why every time I go to the big metropolis I try to bring this simple message along: the world is catching up with your ways and soon “El Jale Chicano” will be our religion. This time I wasn’t the only one saying it. Chris Anderson from DIY Robotics was there to promote his latest book and had similar encouragement for a group of young students that were surprised such a celebrity was looking at them for inspiration.

This is the content of a 2-hour presentation I did for engineering students of one of the universities. My pep-talk if you will:

Open Hardware based on Arduino capable of measuring acceleration and orientation.

Here are a few more details about the gadget we designed for the Bikes in Motion project. While it is still a prototype build with off-the-shelf components and not yet optimized for production, we have been using it for testing on the street. When activated, it is capable of measuring acceleration and orientation, generating a log file that can be later analyzed to produce a general “path shape” of how the device moved during the journey.

Arduino-based, acceleration sensor, digital compass and Open Log.

To continue the conversation about DIY Urbanism, here is a concrete project that we believe fits nicely into this trend and is within our reach.   We call it “Bikes in Motion“.

Better information about the cycling habits of a city to improve its transportation culture

Common wisdom among urban planners is that enabling a larger proportion of the population to rely on cycling to find their way across the core of a city vastly improves the dynamics of the system as a whole.  Cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen have been showing the way for decades.  More recently, far more complex cities like Mexico City have embraced pilot programs to see the bike culture thrive, including bike sharing programs, special days to encourage citizens to go out and bike while eliminating other sources of traffic along important arteries.

It is difficult to know if Toronto is effectively the first city to rollback on the deployment of existing bike lanes, but what is evident is that the lack of precise information about how citizens commute creates a dangerous precedent at city halls in taking such drastic measures.   To this effect we decided to design a system that would allow a group of cyclists to gather data about their movement across the city.

There are several types of solutions already available to track the movement of cyclist along a route.   They range from very simple “check-in” solutions running as apps on smartphones to very sophisticated GPS-based devices that track precise location at all times.   However, for our purpose we decided it would be better to create a very simple gadget that could be attached to a bike, track movement but not precise location and limit the amount of information needed from the outside to function correctly.

We’ll devote a future post to explain precisely how our custom device works, but we believe its cost is low enough that biking organization would have an incentive to promote its use across their members and create a reliable record that can be used in campaigns to promote better cycling lanes along a city.   Above all, this system is designed so every commuter can share the information about her routes without giving away personal information or sharing location in real time which is perceived as a potential threat to safety.

We had plenty of inspiration for this project, including the work from Jo Wood to visualize popular routes in London.   However, we believe in our era of cheap electronics it should be possible to get very accurate information about the paths that cyclists take, and not only their interpolation between origin and destination.   This is how we believe our project will take these ideas further.

5 million journeys pedalled in the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme since its launch in July 2010, created by Jo Wood.

We currently working with a couple of organizations to deploy a pilot program, but it would be great to hear from other cities about similar programs or perhaps even share our design so they can roll out their own program.   If you know about any such city, please let us know.

At the confluence of cloud computing, the Internet of Things, personal fabrication technologies and urbanism there is a fascinating new trend that we’ve been observing coming from urban centres around the world: cities are being transformed one neighbourhood at a time by resourceful citizens that are taking advantage of techniques that range from 3D printing to DIY electronics to smart materials to rewrite the book on urbanism.

Keith Loutit is considered by many the father of the tilt-shift photographic technique, a way to depict common urban scenes as if they were taken of a miniature model. Over the last couple of years I have collected hundreds of such videos, but it wasn’t until last week, when Keith released his latest “The Lion City“, that the genre took an important step forward. I’ll leave you to enjoy the video at your own leisure, but when you do, consider this: the algorithmic precision with which his scenes of Singapore emphasize different layers of a city, remind me of what cloud-computing plus the Internet of Things could do to help us better understand the processes that take place in a city. Not unlike a camera that captures thousands of photos of the exact same corner in a city to help us understand the patterns that emerge, and the incredible processing power to not only stitch all those photos together, but do so in such a way that specific elements of the scene are highlighted or blurred. This is my allegory for how urbanism is about to be disrupted by a convergence dedicated hardware devices and our growing ability to process big data.

IBM calls it Intelligent Operations Centers. Projects deployed all over the world to help cities monitor, measure and manage city services. The premise is simple: deploy sensors that help us measure things we couldn’t and use the same kind of analytics that have been used only in the virtual scale to help us understand the reality of our cities. I’m certain that IBM is not the only big company pursuing this new area of business.

But I’m more interested in what happens when these projects start at the ground level, with a very precise need, a solution hacked together by concerned citizens using their newly found fabrication capabilities and the will to open access to all the information generated. Take, for example, the recent NYC City agency DataDive, an event that was designed to bring new thinking to solve the problem of understanding the evolution of the urban forest and the impact that timely maintenance could have. The concrete tools that came out of this one event were certainly designed to answer the specific questions of one community, but they are a fantastic foundation for other teams to adapt the proposed solutions to their own cities. THIS is what the future of urbanism looks like.

The most interesting ideas are not those that are based purely on software working on virtual abstractions of the real world. The real potential comes from new methods to gather real data from a growing number of dedicated sensors that are measuring every aspect of our cities. This sensorial awakening allows software to better understand what is happening out there. Or perhaps even react on a timely fashion to drastic changes to the environment. Imagine an array of cheap helium balloons deployed across the city, high enough that they get a good grasp of the traffic in an entire neighbourhood so they can inform traffic lights; or a collection of decorative marbles installed along dark alleys, coming to live only when pedestrian traffic merits it; or bus shelter that functions as a solar-based recharging station. The range of ideas to make better cities seems endless.

At Tribal.MX we think our expertise in cloud-computing, big-data dashboards, mapping technologies, personal fabrication techniques and in general the Internet of Things positions us well to help cities navigate this wave of DIY urbanism.

A global citizen is not the one that travels the globe rushing from one destination to the next at the furious pace its business demand, but the one that roams the roads of a city or the world open to the opportunities that serendipity will bring, architecting with each moment a fulfilling life devoted to creating value for the communities he touches, combining his skills with the resources available. Such a nice maxim for any traveller, you must be thinking.

But as much as we fantasize about travelling the world and becoming that global explorer, we are mostly driven by rituals. We go to school or work following the same route every day, we meet with more or less the same people and exchange in average the same rehearsed words. We like the little thrills that the modern hyper-connected world gives us, but we end up “friending” all the same 150 people we’ve known our entire lives. We like the detachment of “following” a few intellectuals or celebrities as there is no effort on our end but panic if a random stranger talk to us on the street. In the long run, we find ourselves surrounded by too many comfortable mellow relationships that are too kind to shake us a little bit and push us higher.

As isolated as may feel in a world of 7 billion people, there is one hero that is surging ahead, thriving on openness and mastering all the skills learned through three or four generations of social networks: our avatar. That smiling, fearless, handsome self-portrait not afraid of making up a few stories to find a place in the collective streams of strangers (the more the better), using the 8-bit equivalent of a grave-voice to teach everyone else life-lessons and revealing beauty in the mundane (yes, that same scene we saw at every commute for years). This alter-ego has found its place in our real-world, projecting our deepest and most sacred thoughts onto a canvas that looks more like a matrix-esque thumbnail composition that exudes personality. Our personality.

And now that our digital avatars feel at easy out there, broadcasting 24/7 on our behalf, are all of sudden running into each other without the caution characteristic of their masters. We call it serendipity in our world, to them it may be algorithmic association or visual coherence, but whatever their secret, it is working. They are now assembled in entire genres and sub-cultures that we barely knew existed, not unlike artisans of a forgotten medieval craft.

And now, for their final movement, they are about to teach us a lesson: how to go back to our tribal ways, connecting with those whose avatars have brought down the walls of anonymity in the name of creating meaningful connections that will rescue our communities from the apathy of routine.