Photo By: Carren Jao

Post By: Max Kanter

In the city, there’s something comforting about seeing symbols showing where local foods are produced, as opposed to of symbols displaying where cars will be towed...

Whether we are aware or not, the built environment communicates to us. Our surroundings contain few words yet convey ample amounts of information, and symbols often replace words to communicate concepts. In cities, systems of symbols embedded into the urban landscape tell us where we can park, what to avoid, how to seek help, and who has power.

This urban iconography effects movement, behavior, and daily life within a city, yet it also goes beyond warning drivers and pedestrians, and becomes an intricate aspect of a city’s brand, aesthetic, and visual story.  

Here at City Works Campaign we recognize the power of good design in urban iconography - conveying complex concepts in a simple yet recognizable manner is a delicate design problem. That is why we are excited about our friend’s at The Noun Project, who have a mission to integrate good design into urban iconography through “collecting, organizing and adding to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world's visual language, so we may share them in a fun and meaningful way”.

For the last year or so, The Noun Project have been active in developing urban symbols on their own and publishing them on the web for others to use. Recently, though, through a partnership with Code for America, they have introduced the concept and importance of urban iconography across the country. Through running ‘Iconathons’ in Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and New York, The Noun Project is bringing together graphic designers, urban planners, non-profit organizations, businesses, and individuals to develop icons based on a theme in urban life, with recent themes including democracy, food, and neighborhoods. The group facilitates the design process and once the symbols are complete they open source the designs for the public to download and use! Open Sourced Design, very exciting stuff!

The theme for the recent LA iconathon was Food, and LA Food experts submitted descriptions of terms relating to Food issues in urban environments, including Farmer’s Market, Community Supported Agriculture, Rooftop Gardens, Urban Agriculture, and Farm-to-School, just to name a few. Teams of designers and foodies worked together to design symbols representing the terminology. The process was extremely collaborative and the resulting symbols were incredibly creative.

The most successful symbols created meaning through minimalist design, recognizable iconography, and an attention to detail. In the photo below, our own Max Kanter worked with designers to develop a “Bee Keeper” symbol, so that, as bee keeping becomes a recognizable practice in urban environments, a symbol is there to let residents know.

One thing that is certain, as the urban ecology of cities evolves and changes over time, the use of new civic symbols has the potential to re-paint the urban landscape. Thanks to The Noun Project, accessing symbols for download has never been easier and we look forward to not only hearing about the results of the upcoming Iconathons around the US, but seeing these symbols integrated into our city, giving citizens greater knowledge of their local area and the practices that take place in their neighborhood.

CIty Works Campaign is based in Los Angeles and although we are really excited about the efforts of certain individuals and groups, we do feel the urge to connect the dots and excite each other about doing more for our city. Our strategy aims to work from the bottom up, creating communities that gain value out of sharing knowledge and skills. But, our process also includes linking our brightest thinkers, tinkers, designers and software developers with influential people in government and business so that we can work towards lasting change and not just individual projects.

So why cities? Well, let's start with the fact that over half of the world's population lives in cities. They are also economic, cultural, and industrial centers where ideas, capital, and power converge. But what City Works Campaign is especially interested in is improving quality of life. However allusive this might sound, improving quality of life could mean investing in a variety of convenient transit options. or maintaining many accessible and pleasant public spaces. It might involve encouraging neighborhood revitalization, creating a transparent city government, or developing a deeper understanding of resource allocation through real time data analysis. In truth, it is a combination of all these things, but none of this will happen without the cross-pollination and integration of a range of community actors, and skilled individuals to create these localized solutions for a particular context.

This is why we decided to launch LA Here and Now - a series of events that aim to facilitate collaboration and the integration of a variety individuals and organizations working to make the city better. Our first event is Tuesday August 2nd, 2011, and we have a great number of diverse people coming down, including representatives from: Hacks and Hackers, Py Ladies, SoCal Pygies, GOOD, ATX, DeLab, CrashSpace, Syyn Labs, Project Fresh, The Noun Project, and the City of LA, just to name a few!
So if you are in LA, then come join the conversation! (RSVP here)

And if you are interested in starting a similar movement in your city, then make sure you get in contact.

For the last several weeks I have been helping the good folks at GAFFTA (Gray Area Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco) with their next Urban Innovation Weekend, coming up this weekend, July 22-24. This event runs as part of their Summer of Smart and this particular weekend, which will focus on transportation, sustainability and energy, is exciting because of a few reasons. Firstly, the city is opening up new transportation data sets specifically for the event, but secondly, we are also tackling the topic of energy-use – an issue that we believe will benefit immensely from some community-generated prototypes and thinking.

Here’s why:

Like the transportation sector before it, the energy sector is finally starting to standardize and open up its data, bringing new opportunities for people like all of us to do interesting things with it. Initiatives like the PAP10 will ensure that there is a standardized information model of energy usage that facilitates national smart grids and also allows individual consumers and other entities access to energy-use data. In addition, some states have already mandated customer access to meter-based information (hopefully we will see anonymized data at a zipcode level following this), paving the way for neighborhood energy competitions and more. Meanwhile, San Francisco is one of the first cities to require commercial buildings to take part in the Energy Manager Portfolio system, which helps owners track, assess and compare energy and water usage in individual buildings, thereby creating an incentive to reduce consumption.

These standards and initiatives are moving us towards a more transparent energy sector, and we couldn’t be happier. However, while research institutes, governments, and think-tanks are working hard to open up data and create standards, it is up to our community of developers, planners, activists, urbanists, artists, and others to dig deep into how and for whom this energy information might most benefit. In particular, how can open (and user-generated) information be used to address the fact that America’s buildings account for approximately 40% of total US energy consumption (according to the U.S. Department of Energy) and that 30% of buildings’ energy is simply wasted (The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency).

This brings us to the second reason why this weekend is so exciting. With an estimated 100+ people coming together from all backgrounds, we can start to generate a real understanding of stakeholder needs, and incentives that can be used to power these new energy applications, projects, and ideas. These incentives can include, but should also get beyond high-level objectives – like saving the environment or doing it for the greater good. For example, we could imagine an app that targets facility managers (our custodians of energy-use in buildings) and turns them into heroes for managing their building in the most efficient manner. Equally, we could imagine interplay between tenants who spot energy inefficiencies in their building and building owners who wish to keep quality tenants while also saving money. Or how about an app for individuals, which not only allows them to keep track of their ‘good energy deeds’ but also equates this with something meaningful, like how much money or trees you are saving, in a gaming environment?

What is clear is that the energy sector is ripe for innovation at the public level, starting from the bottom up. It’s happened in transportation, and now it is energy’s turn. We have already seen a response to energy use in the material sciences sector (think improved LED lighting, low-impact or better-insulated materials or solar panels), through policy changes (one-quarter of all cities have already set targets for the use of renewable energy), and in the construction of real-time energy management systems and smart-grids, and now it is time for the Summer of Smart participants to take advantage of increasingly public data sets and use them to power the next generation of energy saving apps, project, and ideas.

Perhaps the best part of the hackathon mentality is that we have absolutely no idea what will emerge from this weekend – and I couldn’t be more excited to find out.

Back in April we ran LA's first Smart City Camp as part of GOOD's Los Angeles Local Launch. Here is a video of what we discussed, featuring our own Kyla Fullenwider!

The national media has a narrative about Detroit - it is an industrial city gone bad. It is dying, it is dangerous and it will eventually become a ghost town. I unwittingly bought into this narrative until I went there to speak at the From Rust Belt to Artist Belt Conference last week.
Yes, Detroit's population has dropped by 25% according to the census figures, but did you know that over the last 10 years, the number of people with professional degrees in Detroit has risen by over 50%? At the conference was an amazing array of people who were passionate about their city and who understand that yes, this is a city with a vast digital divide, but at the same time, it is a city of communities and there are people who want to make that work.

One of the amazing people on my panel was Jeff Sturges. Jeff started Omnicorp Detroit - local hacker and maker spaces that runs workshops interested and interesting people. We got talking about projects in Detroit that could utilize real-time data, but that cater for non-smart phones. Guerrilla urbanism where we would track bicycles or buses or whatever else would provide value to the community and through SMS (again, no smart phones) give the info back in real time. We would then teach people how to visualize this data and use it as a tool to get local government or transport authorities to implement similar systems in a more rigorous fashion.

Watch this space for more details!