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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\u2019s 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 \u2013\u00a0but really, we need to have different words for war drones and lobster fishing drones<\/a>.\u00a0Being a boat means that it will not be subject to the same ill-fate as Taco-Copter<\/a>, though I read that they might actually be launching soon (please Steve Jobs\u2019s ghost, let this be my one more thing!). I\u2019m sure there\u2019s 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\u2019m 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\u2019m hungry.<\/p>\n 2. Grow Box – Food As A (City) Service<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0box. The\u00a0share\u00a0box is picked up and your produce gets distributed out to the rest of the Grow Box members in the area \u2013 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\u00a0of fresh produce every day, or every other day.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 3. Tethered WindMill Wifi Hotspots<\/p>\n This actually is Greenfield\u2019s worst nightmare. Rather than design a new system from the ground up, I am proposing a mashup of pre-existing technologies: Google\u2019s Loon internet weather balloons and Google\/Makani\u2019s airborne wind turbines. The airborne wind turbine is a great fit for Portland. It is tethered to the ground, so you don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 4. Operation: Get Fit, Get Lit<\/p>\n 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\u00a0what if the sidewalks used the vibrations caused by footsteps to light the streets at night?\u00a0The technology exists, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.<\/p>\n 5. City Gondola<\/p>\n 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\u2019t disrupt pre-existing infrastructure. Portland needs more than lobster and chique restaurants. It needs gondolas.<\/p>\n This is a very cool idea and, upon further reflection, it turns out it isn\u2019t mine. It\u2019s Frog Principal Designer Michael McDaniel\u2019s, and he made a fantastic slideshow <\/a>to 100% convince you that this would totally definitely work trust me I\u2019m a designer.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1] Adam Greenfield, Against the Smart City <\/em>(Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00a0Before 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 … Continue reading Dreams of Food, Robot Boats, and Other Phenomena<\/span>