(today's dawn as seen from my home)
I've just folded my bike and put in on my car. I'll park at Citilab, and then I'll pedal my way to WTC Cornellà. I also packed my standard mobile work equipment: laptop, 3G net modem, notepad, cell phone, crayons, ...
Today's is the day of our Breakout Session in Cornellà which is a way to show and explore together new ways and spaces for working.
This is a collaboration of Citilab with the Breakout Festival in New York City. There, Laura Forlano, Anthony Townsend, Dana Spiegel, Tony Bacigulapo and others got support from the "Situated Technologies" programme to do research and development around he implications of coworking for urban design. That is, how the new patterns of cooperation hint at new ways of devising public and work spaces. Or, how to redesign public spaces to accommodate work "outside of the office" (or the atelier, or workshop or classroom, or, you name it).
Citilab is supporting Laura Forlano's research on the dynamics of coworking, technology and urban spaces. We are happy that Laura's past and present efforts and her dedication to user-driven design (at Parsons School) as well as her PhD work in the comparison of coworking patterns around the world has been instrumental in her joining Cornell University (http://www.hci.cornell.edu/). In relation to Breakout we also support research by University of Barcelona Sociology Department, led by Dr. Jordi Colobrans.
We are also supporting the development of software for holding Breakout Sessions. This connects with our own work at Citilab in relationship to the City, namely the "Perceived City" project (with Juan Freire, Jose Luis de Vicente and Paco González) as well as the project led by a group of citizens in Cornellà to develop a local variant of FixMyStreet, named Alertas Urbanas (more info soon). These activities mix together users, events, developments and, more importantly, research on the connection of it all in terms of urban design, working dynamics, technology, user-driven research. From research we expect to obtain more knowledge about urban dynamics, new services by and for citizens, and new ways to interconnect space, people, and code (if you follow the link you'll end up with a very interesting interview with Mark Shepard, one of the ideators of Sentient City).
There are many threads knot together here, as you can see, and lot of effort by many people. Staff at Citilab (Enric, MJou, Jordi, the other Jordi, Chris, Laia, Isi, Jose "sin oficina" Galaso and many others) have worked a lot to make this happen.
Let's see what we learn today and, specially how we get to know each other better. To start with I am happy to have met some Citilabers (citizens that are members of Citilab) that I hadn't had the chance to know before and who are very happy to volunteer with what they know and can do: Joaquín Jiménez, Pedro Rodes, Maria Ripoll, David Noguera, Antonio Sevillano, José Caballero, Pedro Caparrós and Víctor Casat are a new breed of Citilabers who are bringing in their knowledge in computing, networks, CB radio (yes, they are going to broadcast it the old way too!) and people skills. I hope that they also will learn from other people coming from other places. I'll try to twitt and blog live (on Breakout's Blog http://boc.citilabblog.com/).
To start with, I am interested in the format of Breakout not only for the urban design reasons I already mentioned here, but also as a method to work together and get new things done where the space is more convenient. I want to know if it works as a codesigners format, for example. In any case, I wish we could get rid of meetings and start "breakouting" more!.
Some of the things that we discover or that the NYC discovered their will be shared and discussed at Urbanlabs'09! Don't miss it either!.
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