DESIGNING FOR MISH-MASH: WORKSHOP FINAL SUMMARY by BEN HOOKER
-
Internet products and services profess to allow us to do almost everything through the computer screen such that more and more of our time is spent absorbed in the disconnected virtual words offered though desktop computers, laptops, kiosks, PDAs, mobile phones etc. But as we increasingly rely on these 'immaterial' Internet products and services as part of our daily lives, we perhaps don't consider the extent and complexity of the wider physical repurcussions.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

-
"Google has the potential to destroy the publishing industry, the newspaper business, high street retailing and our privacy ... They know what they are doing technologically; socially, though, they can't possibly know, and I don't think anyone else can either. These are the earliest days in a process of what may turn out to be radical change. The best historical analogy for where Google is today probably comes from the time when the railroads were being built. Everyone knew that trains and railways would change the world, but no one predicted the invention of suburbs. Google, and the increased flow of information on which it rides and from which it benefits, is the railway. I don't think we've yet seen the first suburbs." (John Lanchester writing in the London Review of Books)
---------------------------------------------------------------------

-
An aerial survey of the headquarters of Silicon Valley tech companies does not readily reveal the complexity or magnitude of the physical fallout from all the Internet building work that is going on. The call centres, distribution depots, packing warehouses, server parks and so on are typically not in close proximity of their high land-value company headquarters. But these anonymous, infrastructural buildings very much exist as they are the essential material components of the immaterial products and services they enable. In the unloved landscapes at the urban periphery we start to find them; for example the online book retailer Amazon's main UK depot, one of the largest buildings in Europe, located north of London.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

But although these new electronic landcapes are wide open for experimenting with new forms of building, most early pioneers generally just seem to want to create their existing physical world in cyberspace. Perhaps this is understandable; familiarity is comforting ... although these virtual dwellings seem so un lived-in and lonely.

-
Where are the signs of life? In this landscape there are no noisy neighbours, no twitching net curtains, no human animation. Perhaps there should be – or at least an electronic equivalent to these things.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

-
Or perhaps, rather than fleeing to cyberspace completely, we can explore a more hybrid existence where interfaces encorage activity in virtual, computer generated worlds to subtly influence the physical places we already inhabit.
---------------------------------------------------------------------