WC Archive

DenCity emerged as a student project in urbanism at the RWTH Aachen University, and was inspired by the Keitai City competition sponsored by Japan's NTT DoCoMo. "Keitai" means "portable," and is commonly used to refer to mobile phones; recognizing the growing importance of the mobile phone in Japanese culture, DoCoMo is looking for novel applications of the technology. The focus of the competition is on the ways in which the keitai can mediate the user's experience of his or her urban surroundings.

Hoppe and Kasugai had a similar goal for denCity, albeit with a bit more of an academic approach:

The project is a theoretical and experimental approach to ideas around the integration of urban reality and virtual dimensions. We seek to influence/change perception by the virtual augmentation of physical spaces.

The denCity barcodes become a means of sharing information about a given location in a way that is, in principle, easily accessible to others with commonplace technology. An interesting parallel here is the growing use of tags as a way of organizing information on myriad websites and blogs; these tags aren't assigned by a single controlling organization, but are decided upon by the site owners, the site readers, or both. This emergent form of classification of information has been given the somewhat ungainly term "folksonomy," but it is really just the extension of one's own organizing principles to a shared space. Through the use of tagging, one can keep notes on a variety of websites or issues in an easily searchable and sharable manner.

DenCity, then, could be thought of as "locational folksonomy" -- a kind of metadata overlaying the physical environment.

The same could be said of Yellow Arrow, but, as fun and interesting as the Yellow Arrow project is, it clearly is first and foremost a kind of collaborative art. Most of the arrows seem to link to stories about a given location that can provide insight or amusement; prosaic, functional information is less common. DenCity, conversely, is clearly meant as a framework for "useful" links. Moreover, Hoppe and Kasugai intend for the technology to scale:

DenCity.net, in our opinion, goes beyond yellowarrow in some ways, particularly in its direct networking of the tagged locations and the mapping and urban-analysing possibilities that are opened up by this. Also, via WAP, it is even simpler and cheaper to use than yellowarrow. Furthermore, you can create and print you own tags. But we loved yellowarrow, it has a more artistic approach than our project.

Fortunately, this is not a kind of system in which only one actor can thrive. I would expect to see multiple tags on a given location, from a variety of tagging networks, all accessible to the user but not necessarily using the same keywords and concepts. They may have demographic or sub-cultural emphases, for example, or have differing balances of open comment and spam/troll moderation. Some would be surreptitious, everything from stickers in somewhat obscure locations to graffiti in a restroom stall; others would be more official, a 21st century version of a "Better Business Bureau" seal.

The pieces are not yet all in place for the augmented city, but we're getting close. Projects like denCity and Yellow Arrow help us understand the various ways in which such tagging can be used and abused; while neither project is a perfect seed for real augmentation, both offer insights into what can work. At the same time, we may want to look more closely at currently extant folksonomy tools (such as Del.icio.us) to see what we might need to think about before we start annotating the world around us. How is spamming minimized? How do people decide upon the "right" set of tags? How are serial abusers identified? We'll also need to start thinking about the ways in which the desire to annotate the space around us facilitates a system for annotating our own relationships.

And we'd better start thinking about it soon, because denCity, Yellow Arrow, and the various other experiments in location-based information will only get more detailed, more extensive, and easier to access.