Experimentation is the root of knowledge; carrying nutritious information from the soil of the universe to the blooming, green leaves of the layered neural tissue of our cerebral cortex. Yummy. Before we can drink of this delicious nectar, however, we must first conjure up some insane and baseless ideas for the experiment to test. To this end, I have sat for some time in some number of spaces and seduced the mysterious magician – the ghost in the machine – to work her mysterious magic. She has obliged, but it’s a mixed bag.
1. Lobster Drone
Greenfield writes that, “interventions like [IBM’s] are, for the most part, a matter of incremental enhancement – of off-the-shelf products acquired through existing procurement channels, serviced via conventional contracts, tacked onto [pre-existing] spatial and institutional arrangements.”[1] Well, Mr. Greenfield, prepare to have your mind whisked to a pulp and pulled out through your nose like an Egyptian Pharoah undergoing mummification.
The autonomous lobster drone is a delivery boat (or fleet of boats) that carries packages to the many islands around Portland – and it is so new it will have to be built entirely from scratch. Okay, not entirely, you’ll want to use arduino or something – but what the heck does Greenfield want? Tell you what, we’ll source the arduino boards from local hacker communions. Is there such a thing? There should be. Moving on.
Why is this a good idea? Despite all of the incredible benefits of commercial drones (they are affordable robots built to do our bidding for god’s sake), they face two big non-technological hurdles, 1) they are called drones and they sound scary, and 2) the Federal Aviation Administration has, for good reason, banned the use of commercial drones, and the use of any autonomous aircraft over Class B airspace (i.e. major urban areas). The boat being dressed up as a lobster solves the first problem – but really, we need to have different words for war drones and lobster fishing drones. Being a boat means that it will not be subject to the same ill-fate as Taco-Copter, though I read that they might actually be launching soon (please Steve Jobs’s ghost, let this be my one more thing!). I’m sure there’s a ton of legal issues with autonomous boats too, but almost no one has been working on this so I think we can probably pull a Tesla and just start letting people order them up and see what happens. And I’m not sure if we are supposed to have all of our ideas be things that the city would implement, but this reeks of private sector gig. And lobster. And butter. I’m hungry.
2. Grow Box – Food As A (City) Service
Sofware is eating the world, but what is the world eating? Food. Lots, and lots of it all the time. Rather than teach software to eat food too, Grow Box teaches software to grow food. The idea is to design and manufacture smart hydroponic grow-boxes that fit a few different lifestyles: a large one for people with garages, a smaller one that doubles as a bookshelf for appartment dwellers, and maybe a big flat one that you can put under your bed. Unlike traditional urban gardening, this is not about spending your Sunday picking tomatoes and designing anti-bird defense systems. This is about fresh, cheap, local produce for everyone.
The grow box does all of the planting and even decides what to plant and when based on what other grow boxes nearby are growing. Your only job is to harvest the produce when it is ready, and to not eat too much of it while you do. The grow box always overplants, so it is okay to take some of what you reap, but most of it has to be left outside in your share box. The share box is picked up and your produce gets distributed out to the rest of the Grow Box members in the area – you will get a new share box full of produce as well. Initially, most of the produce will come from local farms, but as the program grows the proportion will shift and the total amount of food will climb. The goal is to provide members a healthy amount of fresh produce every day, or every other day.
This sounds a lot like an idea for a crazy startup, but I think it should be funded by the city. I believe that access to fresh produce is essential to living a healthy life and should therefore be a universal right of a modern society. We already provide huge subsidies for industrial farms, why not subsidize a distributed, urban farm?
3. Tethered WindMill Wifi Hotspots
This actually is Greenfield’s worst nightmare. Rather than design a new system from the ground up, I am proposing a mashup of pre-existing technologies: Google’s Loon internet weather balloons and Google/Makani’s airborne wind turbines. The airborne wind turbine is a great fit for Portland. It is tethered to the ground, so you don’t have to rip out pre-existing infrastructure or destroy your natural landscape, and it generates more power, more consistently, at lower cost than traditional turbines. Project Loon is building high altitude weather balloons that will form an interconnected web over the earth and transmit to special receivers on the ground, which can then be connected to a standard wifi router. A similar system could be used in Portland, but rather than a weather balloon, the airborne windmill could transmit to the receivers and the tether connecting it to the grid could also be hooked in to whatever kind of crazy networking rig you would need to handle thousands of connections.
While I am sure this is an extremely inefficient way to get free wifi, I would argue that mashups like this are actually a great way to build new technology, and I think Greenfield would actually agree so I will stop strawmanning him.
4. Operation: Get Fit, Get Lit
This is much more than a fantastic slogan. Portland is famous for its delicious food and its soul hardening winters. But all of that food, cold, and darkness leads to a lot of lighting and heating costs, and very little exercise. What if we encouraged fitness by creating a gym where everything you did generated electricity? And what if the sidewalks used the vibrations caused by footsteps to light the streets at night? The technology exists, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
5. City Gondola
Buses are noisy, guzzle gas, and take up lots of space. Trains require massive construction and are incredibly expensive to build and maintain. Gondolas are cheap, scenic, and don’t disrupt pre-existing infrastructure. Portland needs more than lobster and chique restaurants. It needs gondolas.
This is a very cool idea and, upon further reflection, it turns out it isn’t mine. It’s Frog Principal Designer Michael McDaniel’s, and he made a fantastic slideshow to 100% convince you that this would totally definitely work trust me I’m a designer.
[1] Adam Greenfield, Against the Smart City (Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader)
Tethered Windmills seem like a more necessary technology in less developed places. Their advantage over other types of wireless technology is that they work in isolation, absent other forms of infrastructure. But Portland has all that other infrastructure that other countries lack. I agree that the technology is very cool. It just seems more applicable in less developed places. Would it be fair to say that the primary goal with this project would be free public wifi all around the city? How do the Gondolas work? I understand it was a joke, but if we are going to take it seriously, how do people get around the city? Should the city refocus around the waterfront?
Well the airborne wind turbine is much more efficient overall than traditional turbines, so it’s a good fit for anyone who wants to harness wind power as a renewable energy source – but it’s a hairbrain idea to put them over Portland and use them to distribute internet access.
And sorry if the Gondolas seemed like a joke, it totally isn’t! I think Gondolas could be great for larger urban areas, but they could work in Portland for getting people across the bay or even to the Maine Mall or something.
The idea of using drones within an urban setting is extremely attractive. A high-level personal drone, which at one time would have broken the Army’s budget, can literally be put in every house for a monthly payment on par with that of a two-year iPhone contract. While these still require some human direction, they still have integrated GPS systems that allow them to find their spatial location in three dimensions completely autonomously. Amazon is toying with an even more advanced model of this GPS system with their automated delivery drone prototypes.
However, the idea to attaching a drone to a living animal–and one with a free will that does not match our own–can be problematic though. To call into play the ethics of the matter, the idea prompting any level of psychological control over even such a primitive creature would prompt an endless slew of Greenpeace hate mail. Also, the concept of using drones commercially has already been heavily limited within the United States, mainly by the FCC in terms of their potential for film purposes. Such bureaucracy might be skirted within the public sphere, but one can only be sure if they try.
The idea has great potential–I only make these criticisms as legitimate hurdles that will need to be overcome in order to make such a possible intervention a reality.
hahahah not an actual lobster, just a boat the looks like a lobster.
Very enjoyable read. The only question I have is whether these smart ideas would be better implemented (experimented) in a “Songdo” of Maine, rather than a city which landscaped has barely changed in the past century haha.
Having drones deliver food to people will definitely not encourage people to Get Fit or Lit. The idea would be hard for the public sector to implement. I think this would benefit the private sector more. What kind of infrastructure can be implemented to help the public as a whole? Would the gym be free for the public if it creates electricity? How would that affect the other gyms?
– Totally agree about the private sector: “..this reeks of private sector gig. And Lobster…”
– I think all of these are infrastructure that could be used to help the public as a whole
– Sure! No city in their right mind is going to build a free energy generating gym, but if they did it would be even more insane for it not to be free or very cheap.
– Good innovation disrupts markets. That’s a good thing. But again, I don’t think the gym is actually a good idea…
Very cool ideas. If ideas you proposed worked, they would cause huge disruptions in the industry. However, I wonder if they are practical for the city of Portland?
Ah, yes, we discussed that while not the most practical, they would grab the attention of tourists everywhere. Your signage work and your focus on technology for the youth indicate a very different direction though. Regardless, your talent for showmanship should always be called upon to reveal the truly amazing in what others would think is banal.