hello lamp post

from about page on their site:

Hello Lamp Post is an experimental, city-wide platform for play. This is an opportunity to rediscover your local environment, share your memories of the city and uncover the stories that other people leave behind. Hello Lamp Post encourages you to look at the city with fresh eyes and engage with systems we take for granted. This is a chance to slow down, reflect and give yourself permission to play.

Hello Lamp Post is an interactive system that gives everyone in Bristol a new tool to talk with each other, through prompts and questions – all facilitated by the city’s physical infrastructure. By referencing the thousands of pre-existing identifier codes that label items of street furniture across the whole city, players can send text messages to particular objects, including (but not limited to) lamp posts, post boxes, bollards, manholes, bins, or telegraph poles.

Hello Lamp Post ran from July 2013 – September 2013 in Bristol. It is currently dormant.

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intro’d to hello lamp post via this post (tweeted from Adam Greenfield):

Read @infovore‘s long piece on the Internet of Things. There’s daylight aplenty betw me & him, but his take is wise. http://tomarmitage.com/2014/12/02/some-of-these-things-are-not-like-the-others/

Tom Armitage

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/agpublic/status/549988792577163264

from post:

What I’m interested in today is what the word Thing in ‘Internet of Things’ means and can be; what happens when we go beyond some particular assumptions about what Things are.

Bratton‘s internet of haeccities

It others the Things – from the network they’re on, and also from their users. Are they on a different network? Their own private internet? Not really. The point is how they co-exist alongside all other agents on the Actual Internet. I tend to use – and might well use in this talk, the phrase connected objects to mean exactly the same thing (and to make myself less uncomfortable).

Watershed explained their concept of a Playable City thus:

A Playable City is a city where people, hospitality and openness are key, enabling its residents and visitors to reconfigure and rewrite its services, places and stories.

It is a place where there is permission to be playful in public.

spaces of permission..

The designer Adam Greenfield has spoken of his preference for the descriptionNetworked City over the capital-S capital-C Smart City. He described the networked city as being made of

declarative actors and objects/spaces that have their own networked identities and shadows

“Smart City” is a marketing notion, wrapped around off-the-shelf, large-scale packages to be deployed onto urban environment and infrastructure. As Adam said at FutureEverything in Manchester this year – it’s the ‘imposition of technologies on people‘.

For starters, we wanted to use as much of what was already present as possible. The city is a surface – a platform – to build upon, and it already has many layers – the physical above and below ground, the legal, many digital representations. Adding another one felt ephemeral, temporary: wouldn’t it be more relevant to show that Bristol was already playable? To use all those existing components within the city, and find a way to draw them together?

We thought it would be interesting for the street furniture you see in a city – lampposts, postboxes, bus stops, cranes, bridges – to be intervention points.

.. a reminder how many of the actors in our cities are not necessarily people.

We kept coming back to the idea of the city as a physical diary.

Those codes are much more tangible than GPS and quite commonplace. You wouldn’t need a smartphone to join in, because we’d locate you by you telling us where you are. Which seems obvious, when you think about it.

At the time, I jokingly said that the Smart City uses technology and systems to work out what its citizens are doing, and the Playable City would just ask you how you are.

The project ran for two months last summer. We had just under 4000 players over the two month run, who collectively engaged in over 9500 conversations -speaking with over 1000 unique objects and ultimately sending 25000 messages our way.

Connected Objects are not just white goods with a Wifi chip. They’re objects that are made more useful through connectivity.

I think that the largest audience for connected objects, right now, is for civic objects with shared usage: the networked city.

That’s why this bus stop isn’t like the other Things.

This bus stop is part of Greenfield’s Networked City: not a giant system, but separate objects with networked identities. The buses have GPS and a network connection to tell the system where they are; the system updates the displays as appropriate – and also the various public APIs it supplies to developers. These objects are part of larger systems, working together.

Why doesn’t my hire bike know its way home – to the nearest empty bike rack – even if I don’t know where that is? What would that object be like if it was connected, and illustrating the data that TFL already makes public?

So what if we embedded that data in the object itself – turned it into an avatar for the service?

So to be blunt: What if a service like Citymapper wasn’t in my £500 mobile phone, but in the city itself?

Here’s the think about locks, and doors: they are excellent seams! They are a speedbump to entering your house. They are designed to make you stop a second and prove that you have the credentials to enter. Seams are points to make decisions, choices, and actually – as a user – to be empowered, rather than ignored or assumed.

When we’re thinking about making Connected Objects, Things on the Internet, diversity and ingenuity in considering what we consider to be an Object, what might be a Thing, feels critical. Not just what objects we can most easily connect; not just Things With Wifi. Instead, things that are radically different for being connected, and that anyone can engage with; that make their seams clear.