fisharepeopletoo

Playmakers and Rule Sets #playmakers

I watched the documentary Playmakers last week.

It's a very entertaining and funny film that brings together lots of good reference points for "pervasive games" or "playful social experiences in public space".

(The subject is still so happily undecided that there is no name to cover even Barg/iglab/Sandpit and all the things that could be at home there.)

One of the questions the film asked was "Why now for this stuff?" and answering "why now?" was a part where I might have added more than is in Playmakers.

The reason being that I think the answer to "why now" is portable gadgets, going right back to the Sony Walkman and ghetto blasters (and for fun why not include skateboards?), because they've made people sharply aware of the unsaid, invisible, unconscious rules of acting in public spaces.

Everyone has these experience daily - the rules are being negotiated, or not, on the fly.

I was in a cafe the other day where there were lots of people working on laptops, me included, with phones on the tables, so this was a place where the agreed rules clearly are "this place has been colonised by people who come here to work, which means they'll need to talk on phones sometimes", but when one bloke's work-related conversation went on past what seemed to me, without having any idea how long it had been, like a reasonable length of time I started to get pissed off, thinking "why don't you go outside? There are people trying to work in here!".

But how on earth were we going to find out exactly what the rules were in order to stick by them, or not?

The rules aren't new, they were always there, and we don't need them written down, we never have, but portable gadgets make us conscious of them, everywhere, all the time.

A mobile phone is an X ray machine for the rules of public spaces.

Quiet coaches on trains are an example of what happens when these negotiations on the fly come up against rules to make the rules non negotiable.

I hate sitting in quiet coaches because you always know that someone is going to break the "no mobiles" rule, which means everyone else is going to feel like they ought to say something to them, not because they are bothered by mobiles, but because of an instinctive sense of fairness - if I have to stick to the rules, so do you.

That makes it sound like mobile phones challenge the "rules" in a trivial way, and that not using your phone in the quiet coach is just bowing down to The Man.

But in fact it's the other way round.

This emotion of wanting to punish rule breakers connects with game theory as it's understood in biology, economics and politics - that we've evolved to cooperate, and are very good at it, and don't need anyone except ourselves to police cooperation, but one of the conditions of cooperation is to punish "defectors", people who try to get the benefit of cooperation without paying the costs (for example if you want to conserve and share irrigation water amongst small farmers, what you need is either lots of policemen with guns and a legal and prison system, or a long standing traditional rule set for making clear, agreed quotas and for publicly shaming people who break them - this year's nobel prize for economics was for the study of rule sets for collective action).

One of the things that I like about Charter Cities is that it brings an awareness of the power of rule sets, and the way they operate - that the outcomes are always emergent, and you can never write enough rules to proscribe all the possible outcomes - into politics, saying (this is my sneaky paraphrase) that you can't dictate good ends, just put good rule sets (good means) in place and wait to see what happens.

And if you looked at contemporary Britain, what you'd probably say, if you were honest, was "it's not fair." The rule set has got messed up somehow. Or ignored. Or it's too easy to defect and get away with it.

In fact, once you start looking at the world through a lens of looking for rule sets, it's quite hard to stop seeing them all over the place, everywhere from nature to how we act in cafes. What is so coherent and timely about Barg/iglab/Sandpit is that they let us rehearse, and have fun with, our observation and negotiation of rule sets.

I know that is quite a lot to claim for a mobile phone to have revealed. But I guess if it's an iphone?

The Rules of Civility on the new New Road

This  is not a pedestrianised street.

If you want to drive down it at 30 miles per hour you are perfectly, legally, welcome.

There are no signs telling you you can, and no signs telling you you can't.

It's been designed to allow people to be civil to each other:

"if you move to an environment based on what we think of as, ‘allowing regulations’ designed to support normal, good, civil behaviour you get a very different picture. You still have to learn these normal rules (like giving way to those more vulnerable than you, avoiding collisions with each other etc) but these are life rules that you need for all of your daily activities and are worth learning. They do not require enforcement because negotiation is carried out on the spot and resolved. There is a reward for compliance because your actions contribute to supporting the wider community (and you will usually receive a smile at least for your trouble). It fully employs our abilities to move amongst each other (look at how people negotiate space in a busy station concourse or busy shopping street). Most importantly it supports good community interaction."

- Martin Stockley, who designed this road, amongst many other things.

 

Telling people what to do doesn't work. But leaving them to work it out for themselves does.

Church Halls are Participatoriums

Church halls are good reference points for participatoriums.

They can be home to lots of rule sets - for table tennis clubs and band nights, campaign meetings and Cubs.

Governed by overall rules of civility - stack the chairs and do the washing up when you are finished.

They are one big room.

But it can be reconfigured - for band night put the amps at one end, for a jumble sale put the trestle tables round the edges, for a film screening put the chairs in rows.

There is common investment and ownership, with negotiation and compromise over use.

They are landmarks, and membership is open to everyone who lives round here.

The Participatorium

The participatorium is the place where the people of our towns and cities present themselves.

The participatorium is one space.

The participatorium has no permanent internal walls.

The participatorium must be hackable -  the walls, floor and roof must be cut-openable, and reclosable.

The participatorium must be temporarily but not permanently sub dividable into both open and secret spaces.

The participatorium must be a landmark.

Everyone who lives here is a member of the participatorium.

Guests are welcome in the participatorium.

The participatorium has rule sets.

The participatorium is free.

Let's Close All the Theatres and Art Galleries

And build participatoriums instead.

A particaporium is the place where the people of our towns and cities present themselves.

Tweets Are Pointless - Haven't We Been Here Before?

Tweets are pointless.

Haven't we been here before?

It's not the content of the message it's the act of messaging that contains the meaning.

What's different, or still being worked out, about twitter is where it sits on the private-broadcast scale of social media spaces.

The closer it is to the broadcast end, the less acceptable the "I'm having my tea now." messages will be.

But it may turn out that different twitter users will position themselves at different points on that scale.

If your only followers are your mates, then "I'm having my tea now" is perfectly acceptable and valuable.

Not because they give a sh*t about you having your tea, but because you and they are still being mates.

[Six Spaces of Social Media ]

Birth. School. Work. Death.

"six months of anonymous cell phone records from more than 100,000 people in a European country, obtained from a European cell phone provider. Those cell phone records gave an approximation of each person's location at the time of each call, because cell phone calls are routed through the nearest cell tower.

He and his colleagues found that people tend not to stray far -- almost three quarters of the people stayed mainly within about a 20-mile circle for the entire six months, and nearly half the people rarely strayed outside a six-mile circle. They also tended to go back and forth regularly between only a few locations, such as home and work."

link

What is Civic and Social Innovation?

When I signed up for the 4iP site I ticked the box that said I was interested in "civic and social innovation".

I take it for granted that I am, but then thought I ought to ask myself what I understand by that.

If you were going to step back and ask what we want from civic and social innovation, what would it be:

• open to everyone
• welcoming of everyone
• able to benefit everyone equally
• not leave anyone behind

It can be innovation without being any of those things, but can it be civic or social?

I don't know if that is a good definition or not, if those are worthwhile principles or not, or even if I should be using buzzwords like "civic and social innovation".

But it's a really good description of what I learned from my heroes .

Where Were You Happiest to Arrive and Why?

For about a year, from February 2007, we put up posters at bus stops in Manchester asking "Where were you happiest to arrive and why?" and inviting people to reply by text message, or read what someone else has written, again by text.

About 2000 people read messages, and 400 sent them in, and these are some of the most memorable:

picadilly is my best, because i found the love of my life there. Ten years strong. By jim of salford.

At ashton new road waiting for a bus to take me home from another one night stand!

Im lonely need company

the 8 to bolton every tuesday night for a couple of pints with the lads to break the working week. Can't beat it!

Happiest to arrive back at the hospital the morning after my little girl had been born :-)

arriving at stepping hill hospital after childline stopped my son from killing himself

getting the bus to the hospital in time to see my brother before he died he was only 19

The 375 terminus at Shiloh Road - it has to be Manchester's loneliest bus terminus, with sweeping moorland views

rail replacement from stockport to sheffield the peaks are gorgeous today in the sunshine

[it takes a lot of good humour and some lovely scenery to write that about the rail replacement bus service!]

And finally, this fantastic piece of Zen philosophy for living:

I am always happiest to arrive somewhere when i am late and it turns out that everyone else is late as well, especially on a sunny day!

Muscle Memory of Cities

A really nice remark by Matt Jones during the Urban and Social Media presentations at Futuresonic :

"we get a kind of muscle memory of cities, like where is the best place to cross the road. Can we surface this for each other" using the streams of data we now generate.