The mystery of phantom traffic jams explained

If you’ve ever wondered why you can spend an aeon in a traffic jam on a motorway with no apparent cause, why we’re so intolerant of each other when we’re driving and why we think it’s ok to speed but never to go through a red light, then I’d recommend the book Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt…

As well as being a compelling account of the crazy paradoxes of the psychology of driving (for example SUV drivers are more likely to be talking on the phone and not be wearing a seatbelt because they feel safer, which means they’re actually much less safe than those in smaller vehicles), I’d also recommend the book to any fans of behavioural economics. In place of conventional economists, the too-rational target in this book are traffic engineers, who continue to plan road systems in the blithe belief that humans are completely rational beings. The book, sometimes hilarious sometimes tragic, shows us that we’re not, and that this has a huge impact on the way people live their lives alongside, and too often under, motor traffic the world over.

The book does have one hero however, in the shape of Hans Monderman who pioneered the ‘shared space’ approach to street design in the Netherlands. This concept of street design compels us as drivers to take more care by manipulating our sub-conscious to respond to a lack of rational information. A powerful example of ‘nudge’ psychology in action, Monderman’s approach is the reason why we now have more raised junctions for example, and that there’s a trend away from the compulsion of signs and markings to more effective ways of shaping driver behaviour. While this type of progressive design is seen mostly in built up environments, it’s the two-way, high-speed country road that’s the world’s biggest killer. This is becoming a massive issue for humanity as tens of millions get into cars for the first time in countries like China and India.

Ultimately, this is a fascinating book about how our pre-historic brains are incredibly bad at calculating risk within the sort of timeframes demanded of them while at the wheel of a car.

Wayne & Garth Spotted

Alongside the part of my phone that actually makes calls (the old fashioned bit), my Google Maps app is probably one of my most used. It’s become indispensable in the same way that being able to text once was. What would we do without it!

Modern spoils aside, the success of Google’s mapping technology may partly be down to its adaptiveness. As with all good web services, the Google Maps API has spawned a mass of location based mash-ups. Google, for example, recently partnered with We Are What We Do to create the wonderfully rich Historypin. It’s all too easy to forget about the history that surrounds us here at The Partners HQ, but a quick post code look up perfectly placed archived and geo-tagged photos from over 100 years ago. To refer to images like this in isolation is one thing, to see them in context and contrast with our modern surroundings (places we inhabit everyday without considering the past) can completely transform our sense of place. Today, Berg London announced Dimensions. Born out of a series of workshops with the BBC, this set of mash-ups forces us to reconsider our surroundings by overlaying historical, political, and environmental data on to our own neighbourhoods. With these filters and layers applied, mapping becomes less about wayfinding, and more about changing perceptions of our sense of place; both of our own locality, and of others’.

With Google’s Street View, the mental images and memories of our surroundings are at once put to test, and the sheer volume of imagery captured by Google’s roaming cars across the world must represent one of the most significant image archives in existence. It provides us with an almost complete panoramic view of the urban environment, albeit one recorded in 1/100th of a second. For the virtual tourist, or the freeze frame voyeur, street view offers a world of exploration like never before. Last year, Art Fag City bought together snapshots of some of the more weird and wonderful findings. Our treasured Daily Mail more recently got in on the act with the story of a seemingly dead girl laying in the street.

Thank god last year’s AR craze has seemed to have died down, when every brand seemed desperate to get a piece of the emperor’s new clothes. This highly ironic video summed it up perfectly. Why do something that could be much better achieved without the added layer of a webcam? Context, of course, is key. ART + COM showed that there were practical and meaningful applications for the technology when they bought dinosaurs out of their skeletons and bursting into life at Berlin’s Museum of Natural History. And with dedicated hardware in gaming consoles, the opportunities still seem genuinely engaging. Oh to be a kid today!

Of course mobile and augmented technologies are a match made in heaven. Amsterdam’s Layar first launched on Android some years ago now, but the potential still seems to be slowly unfolding, and marketers are quicker now to spot an opportunity. While The Rolling Stone’s take on the Layar app for their Exile On Main Street album may have been overly literal, it’s interesting to think how we can begin to engage an audience not just online, but in the real world too. Over in Japan, where adoption of new technologies is often quicker than anywhere else, the Sekai Camera app spawned an ‘Air tagging‘ phenomenon. Surely it’s just a matter of time before this spreads. Let’s just hope users can learn to leave data behind that actually enriches our surroundings, and resist the kind of comments you’re likely to find in a shoreditch pub toilet.

Yesterday I received a notification from Google informing me I was now being tracked by Latitude. I’d opted in for this some time ago, only to be disappointed to find very few of my friends had shared my enthusiasm. Sharing your location with Google (search now factors in your location) is one thing, sharing it with your friends, it seems, is another.

The social aspect of location awareness is, however growing fast. And while Foursquare’s success may be in part down to its reward schemes and gaming aspects (ultimately, its competitive nature), the check-in concept now seems to be spreading beyond the merely physical, with more & more start ups like Gomiso allowing us to ‘check-in’ to movies and tv shows. It’s yet another way of allowing us digital natives to define ourselves not just by where we hang out, but also by what we consume. In 2010, privacy, and personal space appear outdated concepts, while the commodification of the personal reigns supreme.

If anyone can popularise the concept of location in the social space, it’s Facebook. Sure enough, Mark Zuckerberg recently confirmed rumours that Facebook will soon be adding location to its services. Facebook might just show Google how it should be done here. Friends & followers, are you with me?

With examples from around the world, and going beyond graffiti and street art, this book celebrates the next generation of urban artist. Some of them are beautiful, some of them are funny, some of them are poignant, but all of them are brilliant. Of course, we have some work in it also:

We’d highly recommend this book as it’s one you definitely need to have in your collection. Personally, I love it and have it, selfishly, guarded on my desk as I keep liking to flick through it and ‘oohing’ and ‘ahhing’ at all the very clever and wonderful work. And no, on that note, you can’t borrow it. <clings tightly to book>

For those of you that don’t know, WEF is an opportunity for those who are at the head of the (board)table to thrash out their views about the state of the World and what they are hoping for in the upcoming year — a big, big deal. I overheard someone in the corridor saying; “If you’re in to politics, this is the place to be.” So no pressure then? Previous years have seen such heavy hitters as Richard Branson, Tony Blair, and even ex-president Bill Clinton attending the event hosted in the small Swiss skiing resort — such is the importance of the WEF conference. With the World economy recovering from crisis, this years WEF focused on the topics of Rethink, Redesign and Rebuild.

We were asked by our client to set up some digital brand communications within their corporate sponsored area. This took the form of a series of branded animations (two animations for each day of the conference) playing across large screens mounted along the walls so that the guests could watch, and follow, the animations as they moved through the space.

Without going into lots of information about the animations themselves, I thought I’d treat you to a video of my non-scripted ramblings via a Flip video camera that I recorded whilst I was there.

(Expect some mild expletives and some general poo-pooing of every other branding scheme…)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Having also visited the new Westfield mall in west London recently, it’s clear that to compete with online shopping, the retail experience must offer something extraordinary – theatre, entertainment and um, toilets. Although sad to see them go, we won’t miss the crap shopping experience of Woolies et al.

One more thing on Westfield, what is it with THAT logo? Eek…

Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen (OSKA) architects is responsible for the design of the new ‘whatcom museum’. Located in Bellingham, Washington State, the concept behind museum’s modern design is to bring as much activity as there is on the inside of the building, to the outside. The project is still in progress, but the focus of the new art and history institution will be a 36-foot-tall, 180-foot-long translucent wall, known as ‘the lightcatcher’, which will act as a backdrop to the building’s central courtyard. The installation of this wall is meant to encourage the public to participate and engage in activities surrounding the museum. [designboom]