It is said that when Singapore was building the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) in the mid-eighties, the then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew consulted the highly respectable Venerable Hong Chuan about the plan. The latter warned that the tunnelings would severely damage the excellent fengshui of the island, and the only solution was to ensure all Singaporeans carry a bagua (octagon diagram) with them.
But this was impossible among the different races and religions, so PM Lee thought of an excellent idea: to design the new $1 coin with the shape of a bagua, so that it would be carried by all Singaporeans.
This urban legend was made believable due to the coincidence of the timings: The new $1 coin was launched in September 1987, just two months before MRT began its first operation.
A further addition to the rumour was the road tax label, also in the shape of an octagon, which means every car on the roads of Singapore would be carrying a bagua too.

I’d heard that the shape of the dollar coin was intended to give everyone a bagua to carry, but it never occurred to me to wonder what sort of geomantic effect building an MRT system would have. Fascinating.

A while ago I was thinking about what looked like a change of attention amongst Singapore’s planners and developers away from the horizontal and towards the vertical:

Singapore definitely seems taller. But lots more of it seems to be underground as well. There are new connectors between Wheelock Place and Orchard MRT, a new subway between City Mall and Suntec, three new floors of shops below ground in Ion mall. Rather than reclaiming land horizontally, from the sea, and eventually from Indonesia and Malayasia, Singapore seems to be reclaiming it vertically. No new territory, as far as the map is concerned: instead, they’re using engineering to overcome the physical resistances of densely-packed earth and thin, unsupportive air to fit more people (and businesses, and advertising) in the area they already have, in the same way that engineering and ambition enabled them to reclaim vast areas of land from the sea. It must be easier than facing the political resistances that limit horizontal expansion. Or perhaps it’s a way of overcoming them: tunnels between malls in Johor Bahru and Woodlands must surely already be on a planner’s laptop somewhere.

I just came across the Economic Strategy Committee’s report, published on the 30th January 2010, a month before my speculation on the change of axis. About three-quarters of the way through, there’s this recommendation from the committee:

Adopt a long term perspective and invest ahead to create new land and space. While we can expand our land mass through reclamation as we have done for Marina Bay, there will be limits in the long-run. In the next 10 years, the government should seek to catalyse the development of underground space as a means to intensify land use. We should put in place enablers for underground development such as by developing a subterranean land rights and valuation framework, and by establishing a national geology office. We must also develop an underground masterplan to ensure that underground and aboveground spaces are synergised, and invest in the creation of basement spaces in conjunction with new underground infrastructural projects (e.g. rail), so as to add to our “land bank”.

Subterranean land rights and valuation framework, and an underground masterplan. Making sure above and below are lined up. And adding to a store by creating more empty spaces. As usual, Singapore is a few steps ahead of my imagination.

Considering the future is widely reckoned to be a useful and productive undertaking, giving groups and individuals confidence in the decisions they take in the present, informing their goals and aspirations and helping them to try to anticipate and respond to change, with some authors calling for a greater recognition of the value of learners engaging with accounts of the future within current curricula (Facer & Sandford, 2010; Slaughter, 2008; Damasio, 2003; Hicks, 2002). There are a number of different approaches towards engaging with the future employed by different sectors – policymakers, corporate strategists, social science researchers, product designers – but they share a common desire to consider the future as open, a need to offer compelling stories of future events or behaviours, and, usually, an obligation to provide an appropriate level of evidence in support of these stories. In many cases, this need for robust accounts of the future capable of engendering confidence in their utility leads to the use of quasi-scientific language and methodologies, borrowing ways of describing and valuing the world from domains that are trusted to talk about future events, such as engineering or economics.

Adam and Groves (2007) describe the social imperatives that lead to this “scientific” approach towards producing accounts of the future, and suggests that they arise from a dominant ideological perspective that encourages us to consider the future as open, unclaimed and susceptible to colonisation: by constructing futures as immaterial and “extraterrestrial”, elites are free to operate without considering the material consequences of their actions. Introducing Bauman’s (1998) description of “the great war of independence from space”, they note that accountability and responsibility are notions that are strongly coupled to territory, and by projecting their actions into a placeless and abstract domain, these elites are able to evade their legal and moral obligations to communities experiencing the consequences of those actions. Castells (2009) describes a similar state of affairs in discussing the “mythical future time” mobilised by corporate planners, and the way in which their work projects the present-day values of the powerful into the future. In both these descriptions, what leaves the future open to colonisation is the way in which it is represented as abstract, immaterial, placeless, remote, general and unconnected to the present we experience and inhabit. This representation of the future positions it as a resource to be exploited, rather than the dwelling of real people to whom we owe the same moral obligation as those existing now (Groves, 2007).

If it is the remoteness and abstraction of futures as commonly represented that works to obstruct positive social action, then, there is a need to discover a way of constructing possible futures that allows people to connect to real, actual places and people. By accepting the immaterial and de-spatialised futures of powerful elites, we abdicate the right to act in our interests and abandon our future lives to those who have different interests to our own. We need a way of representing futures as connected, placed, real, local and enmeshed within networks of being in order to resist these forces.

Drawing on authors in the ecological tradition (e.g., Berry, 1977; Leopold, 1966), who have drawn attention to the need for societies to recognise the value of place and the ways in which elements of ecological systems – including human beings – are interconnected and interdependent, and on writers in the field of education futures (particularly Slaughter, 2004 and Hicks, 2002), this paper develops the notion of ‘located futures’ as just such a way of representing futures.

Located futures are accounts of alternative futures articulated in relation to a particular place: more broadly, they are futures that have been constructed with a sensitivity to the rootedness and located nature of lived experience. Futures are inescapably located – they happen in some place. By paying attention to what might come to pass in a particular location, it becomes possible to recognise the difference between this and the futures that happen elsewhere, offering an opportunity to counter the general and homogenous quality of the dominant futures constructed on behalf of and in the interests of corporate entities, and connecting those who currently inhabit that place with those who are yet to do so.

Subsequent work will describe the notion and derivation of ‘located futures’ in relation to the domain of education, explore the ways in which they might extend our capacity for embedding futures thinking within learning, and consider some practical applications within a learning context.

The above is a picture of a piece by Niklaus Rüegg, set in a village on the border between France and Belgium.

I want to make a game with this idea, handing out the same 16 frames to teams with cameras and imagination and seeing what they bring back. Everyone gets a “Suddenly..!”, a “POW!” explosion, a “Meanwhile, back at base..”, and a “But – “, and maybe a few dry-erase speech balloons, and an afternoon to go and use the city as their source. Maybe commuters crowding onto a train could be recast as henchmen rushing to their stations. Or a flock of pigeons could be accompanied by a single “Fly, my pretties!”. Or a frame could be strapped to a bike for authentic speed lines.

I’ve got no idea how you’d judge it. Perhaps you’d get credit for smuggling in certain locations, or for particular themes, or for managing to subvert comic convention, or just for running around town in spandex dressed as Captain Super. Perhaps the best one would be from the team of film students who make a comic out of other people making comics, though that could just as likely be the worst. Maybe the most popular one would be a collaboration between a six-year-old and their grandpa.

Anyway, I’d like to see it, and if I make it back to Bristol in time for the next Igfest I might see if I can do something about it.

Berg and Dentsu have made Suwappu, toy animals imprisoned in tiny digital pens that follow them wherever they go, tolerant and understanding of the dark inner lives each lead and the destructive impulses that follow bad dreams, dreams made of unbalanced psyches and snippets of the commercial fog surrounding them. At the mercy of promotional messages from car manufacturers and record companies, they struggle to connect their debilitated and half-formed consciousnesses, trying to assert basic values of trust and dependence as best they can with their stunted minds.

Their situation reminds me of the sort of existential struggles Russell Hoban’s toy characters live with, the drummer and the clock in the Mouse and his Child, the wind-up tin frog in love with La Gioconda, with their personalities crushed almost into nothingness by the constraints of their form and experience, tiny glimmers of self trapped in a hallucinatory interdimensional timelessness. I don’t think Badger will ever stop having bad dreams.

Update: Rodcorp adds what I want to call suwappu fanfic – love the Riddley Walker/primal tone, brilliant – very We3

Related: Geoffrey West on using complexity theory to consider cities as organisms, and Grant Morrison’s city-virus:

No one’s really sure where it came from or who brought it to us, but like all viral organisms, its one directive is to use up all available resources in producing copies of itself. More and more copies until there’s no raw material left and the host-body, overwhelmed, can only die. The cities want us to become good builders. Eventually, we’ll build rockets and carry the virus to other worlds.

Not being able to tell the difference between reality and manipulated experiences isn’t just about being able to spot photoshop tricks or video manipulation, it’s when people start to ape the facial tics and artificial physical gestures of people – models, actors, people who need to fake enthusiasm and engagement – in the same media that are edited so inhumanly. Not just realistic light and hair textures from graphics packages, but convincing mimes of limbs moving in a non-human way, with the arrested momentum and weightless control of a Pixar film. I’d always thought that there were two classes of behaviour to think about, when thinking about real or virtual behaviour: people behaving like humans and computers behaving like things, But now I think there are two more classes: people behaving like things and computers behaving like people. The digital and the human standing either side of the uncanny valley – they’re not looking for a bridge, they’re making their way down the side to meet halfway.

Perhaps in popular culture we’re already negotiating the sort of collision between human and machine intelligences that’s struck me before: in the linked pieces I (and in the second, me and Keri Facer) mention the possible need for a curriculum that helps us learn about and develop collaboration and cooperation between human and machine intelligences. But maybe putting it like this betrays my limited perspective: maybe by the time that kind of curriculum comes around the gap it’s bridging won’t be apparent to anyone.

This will have to affect the way we work. Offices are organised around sitting, finding places for workers to sit, finding places for guests to sit: whole industries revolve around making things that can be accessed from a sitting height. Some people use lecterns or more modern desks designed for use while standing. To be honest, I can’t see how giving yourself varicose veins is a good alternative. Surely the message from this research is that your body needs variety and activity? Lots of small movements that keep your muscles alive and awake.

I saw a Kinect in use for the first time yesterday. The Singapore Simulation and Gaming Association held a ‘family-friendly’ event, which involved an Xbox running Kinect Adventures to occupy the children who had come along. I didn’t manage to get a go, unfortunately, though lots of people have already written about the uncanny nature of interacting using a body rather than a peripheral, and I’d love to try one. But watching it in use was fascinating, and I wondered how it would be used in a workplace, to move around a desktop, rather than a game.

It would certainly be one way to reconcile the need to do work with the need to avoid sitting. It might be expected that it would also reveal certain patterns in our work, through making certain sets of muscles ache more than others. This would be interesting and revealing in itself, of course. But perhaps this new source of fatigue could be used to add a layer to our digital work that isn’t always present?

The metaphor of the desktop, with its files and folders, might be extended through modelling the degree of resistance involved in moving a certain file or performing a particular operation – that is, files would not only have content but weight. Some files could be harder to move than others, or involve more work to manipulate. They would have an extra dimension, becoming more than just equivalent white rectangles with a pixellated drop-shadow. Some files could be sent careening around the desktop with a flick of the wrist, while others might need a solid shove from the core. Maybe this isn’t exactly “weight”, but it’s something quite a lot like it.

How could this be used to communicate more information about them? One immediate choice might be to link filesize to resistance: the larger the file, the heavier it is. There’s something appealing about this, turning a digital property into a physical one. Deleting an old todo-list would be an easier job than pulling photographs off a camera. But it seems unfair, in some ways, to give these files this extra depth without seeing it as a cost to the person moving them around. If file-weight is going to make it harder to do certain jobs, wouldn’t it be more interesting to make this meaningful in the context of the person who’s doing them?

A get-things-done fan or efficiency hacker might see value in making the unappealing jobs light and the potential distractions heavy, so a timesheet could be handled with the same aplomb and dexterity as a sheet of origami paper, while Solitaire or timesink URLs might be dauntingly immobile. I’m sure this sort of self-management would be useful, at least until muscles developed sufficiently. But, to me, it’s more interesting to think about how the meaning of documents could be made tangible through their weight. It should be harder to fling around a will or a contract than a do-list or an IM chat. I have a hunch that I’d treat a heavy text with more respect when contributing to it than I would something flimsy and weightless. There’s a cultural history to access in support of this: we’re used to thinking about lightweight articles or weighty tomes. And there’s something appealing about making an insubstantial property more real, acknowledging that this invisible object has a proper presence and meaning in the world.

There are different ways of determining an object’s worth or meaning, of course, and the way this should relate to its perceived weight. People could decide for themselves, setting it to the degree they felt appropriate. This sounds like extra housework, though, and not the sort of extra work that could be made more than a chore. Perhaps some set of algorithms could look at the file, compare it to the files it came in with, relate this to what it knows about the relationship between senders, check it for keywords, decide where it stands in comparison to documents that have been weighted already, and so on, before assigning it a preliminary weight for people to tweak later. That would be more useful, though it risks setting expectations wrongly, I suppose, with people anticipating a document of little importance paying less attention to something that’s worth more of their time. Whichever way is chosen, it would need to look outside the operating system somehow, examining accompanying messages from the real world, to make sure that the object’s real, social worth was being addressed.

Once people start sending each other documents that can be weighted, of course, we could expect a rapid escalation in heavy files, in the same way that flags and “important!” checkboxes are abused and meaningless right now. Heaving a massive file out of an inbox only to discover an injuction on certain foods being stored in the office fridge would become tedious very quickly, and once the connection between weight and meaning is broken the whole exercise would become worthless. Letting other people influence the weight of a document might culminate in simple but effective denial-of-service attacks, in which users are left frustratedly pawing at gigantic files that block access to the desktop as effectively as a mine collapse. Perhaps weight should be accreted to documents gradually and automatically, reflecting the way they become meaningful. Early versions would seem insubstantial, while later revisions seem overloaded and too troublesome to engage with fully: there would be a brief period when a document is weighty enough to seem worth taking seriously but not yet unmanageable and weighed down by an accumulation of commentary.

All this would slowly change the way office work is conducted and perhaps even what we understand a digital document to be. Bold hopes, perhaps. But perhaps the boldest hope would be that this Sisyphyean struggle to shift a never-ending stream of digital boulders from one virtual place to another might be enough to persuade people to choose to move outside, away from the computer, and leave their humanoid robot to plough the digital fields on their behalf.

“little slices of time that are constantly being reactivated, like reliving a memory and keeping it alive, despite time’s passage. By using loops I’m holding onto something valuable that in the real world has slipped away.”

This is a way of talking about manipulating time that triangulates the two phrases I’ve heard a lot recently in connection with giving birth, hypnosis-induced “time distortion” and the “chronological management” employed by medical staff to regulate the process of delivery. I prefer this idea, with its modesty and sensitivity to the worth of small moments.