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As the number of people moving to cities continues to rise, with 66% of the global population expected to live in urban areas by 2050, it is critical to understand how urban living is affecting us — Urban Mind
Living in a concrete jungle has its pros and its cons, but how exactly does urban living affect mental wellbeing? A new cross-disciplinary project intents to find out by using a smartphone app called Urban Mind. The app is designed to monitor various aspects of a metropolitan environment... View full entry
Abandoned commercial port turned progressive inner city district of Helsinki Kalasatama is being developed purposefully to test out new urban ways of being. First up for this pioneering zone: a Mobility-as-a-Service app, which is basically the Nordic version of Uber except it wants to integrate... View full entry
Shanna Tellerman wants to help you redecorate your home. She’s not a designer, furniture aficionado, or personal shopper. She’s the founder and CEO of a company called Modsy that rolls all of the aforementioned jobs into one mobile app to make redesigning a room easier (and more fun) [...]
What makes Modsy different from the handful of other home design tools out there is that it actually lets users see designs in the context of their own homes—and its renderings are utterly realistic.
— Fast Company
The architecture of the app seems effective, if a bit out of touch with the on-demand expectations of today's digital consumer. After signing up, a user is asked to complete a quiz to figure out their aesthetic and then upload some photos of the space in question, along with its dimensions.About... View full entry
Ever since Apple announced the launch of the supersized iPad Pro tablet and its Pencil companion, the anticipation grew which new apps—specifically developed for designers and creatives—could fully make use of the enhanced capacity: a more powerful A9X processor, larger 12.9-inch Retina... View full entry
Apple has a secret app in the App Store which allows some iPhone users to map the interior of a building using their handset. First discovered yesterday by developer Steve Troughton-Smith, an app called Indoor Survey has been available on the App Store since last week.
The software is currently hidden in the App Store and is not operational, suggesting that the official launch is around the corner.
— idownloadblog.com
The indoor positioning app "Indoor Survey", which allows users to pin their location on a map within a given structure, seems to also function as a mode of "crowdsourced Ground Truth" to improve Apple Maps' accuracy. As the app is still "hidden" and not searchable, the only way to download is... View full entry
Architects and designers have adapted to the digitization of the creative process, although trustworthy paper sketchbooks, notepads, and journals remain as an essential free-flowing workspace for brainstorming ideas. Morpholio conveniently combines both realms in Journal, a new app that redefines... View full entry
RideWith is a spinoff of the Google-owned Israeli traffic app Waze, and is designed to help users meet up with a driver who has a similar commute. In the interest of time, money and potentially the environment, passengers can pay drivers who are already taking similar routes. [...]
Drivers using RideWith are only allowed to make two trips a day — intended to be the commute to and from work — and therefore wouldn’t be able to use the app for any notable revenue.
— nextcity.org
The L.A.-Waze partnership is, at least in theory, an initial step toward allowing the city’s planners and engineers to regain a healthier role in mediating the kinds of longstanding cross-town conflicts that Waze has renewed and amplified. Whether the deal will help to resolve fundamental long-term issues related to the city’s growth and inadequate infrastructure is another matter. — newyorker.com
Instagram may very well have enabled a whole generation of false artisans—and even encouraged cliché street imagery by promoting hashtags like #middleoftheroad and #strideby through its Weekend Hashtag Project—but the effect may not be so terrible. Quoted in The Telegraph in 2011, Teru Kuwayama, a photojournalist who is now photo community manager at Facebook, compared the rise of Instagram to the advent of electronic music, both of which stimulated “amateur expression.” — americanphotomag.com
I think our hope is that it will make guests connect to the hotel in a different way by understanding the thoughts of the architect and the designer, who wanted to create more of a community than a typical hotel lobby — intransit.blogs.nytimes.com
Residents of the world’s most polluted city—New Delhi, in case you were still wondering—can now find out exactly how toxic the air in their neighbourhood is. [...]
“People are clueless about the air they are breathing. If there is fog, they think it might be pollution,” he said. “People will have this information on their fingertips now.” [...]
While the government figures out a way to bring pollution under control, this app could help people buy time.
— qz.com
Related View full entry
Public parks do much more than provide places to play, relax or exercise – they can also preserve portions of the natural landscapes, and remind us of our city’s history. In Los Angeles’ urban core, where public parks are few and much of the landscape has already been paved in concrete... View full entry
Friday, August 29:MIT's MindRider helmet draws mental maps as you bike: The prototype is currently being used to create a mental-map and guidebook for NYC, and an upcoming Kickstarter campaign will attempt to fund the project for commercial sale.In Beirut, a grassroots push for more grass... View full entry
In collaboration with fifteen poets and community activists from StartUp Box South Bronx, I recently created Memories of the Future, a location-based cinema project viewed on mobile phones. The group experimented with spoken word poetry, site specific performance, and on-site spectatorship to reframe the predominant view of Hunts Point and speak about possibilities for its future from a position of power. — urbanomnibus.net
There has long been a subculture of so-called “urban explorers” who have made a game of accessing off-limits places. [...] Urban explorers take photos mainly to document that they’ve been there, while for Deas the image is the whole point. The outlaw Instagrammers have more in common with graffiti artists, another subculture of underground creatives who make their work in the cracks of the urban landscape. — nymag.com
Previously in Russia: Skywalking - hacking architecture in Russia View full entry
