Friday night meetings have been hard to pull together over the last little while. Managing to fit together six different schedules can seem next to impossible sometimes, so it’s all the more fun when we can actually pull it off and all be in the same room at the same time.

We caught up on the recently launched Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation, the upcoming Save the City event, and some ideas for the proposal we’re hoping to put together for CAFKA.

Josh and Rosina had been working on some ideas for our proposal, the idea of looking at the border-zone, so to speak, between Kitchener and Waterloo. They had been looking up the role of embassies.

Some of the notes from Josh and Rosina’s meetings. We’re hoping to build something.

Danielle suggested constructing one building, sitting at the border between Kitchener and Waterloo, which would facilitate interactions that somehow demonstrate the border line.

Michelle suggested we consider thinking about the ways in which Kitchener / Waterloo work together as one large neighbourhood in relation to Windsor and Detroit.

We also hung a lamp. There aren’t any overhead lights in the front room where we usually meet, and it’s hard to feel productive in dim mood lighting alone. It also makes writing on large pieces of paper a lot easier.

So, what did we write? Well, you can see above the drawing that I tried to copy from what Rosina and Josh put together, with an addition of a large LED counting sign (kind of a people served tally).

We tried to figure out what an embassy could look like (both physically and in terms of activities), and what a project based around an imaginary embassy could do. This line of thinking really comes out of wanting to compare other border situations (that may not really be borders at all, but are somewhat analogous to the Windsor / Detroit relationship), in order to imagine what the border situation could look like here.

So, we came up with a two-step passport process. We felt pretty good to continue with refining the basic writing around the proposal and some renderings of what the physical structures (of the embassies) could look like.

The rest of the week, we’ll be getting ready for Saturday’s, Sing to the Streets, which will be a huge amount of fun! Francophone folks songs, uncovering the city’s French history, and a mini-parade — you should come!

72 Hours is an audiovisual intervention comprised of a series of video projections evoking the personal histories of neighborhood residents, which will be seen through the building’s windows, and one unit will be opened to the public for a walk-through sound installation that evokes lives of former owners. You can see some of the projections above, as installed in a gallery.

The houses in question, clustered together in the space of a city block, are owned by Deutsche Bank and other international banks. During the Block Rebellion, demands will be made to immediately cease all no-fault post-foreclosure evictions and begin negotiations to sell back the vacant units at real value.

According to the artist, John Hulsey, “the projections serve as injunctions, insertions into contested areas of the city. Transforming private neighborhoods into public arenas for debate, the projections may create spaces in which dialogue can be breached.”

It’s an interesting project, makes me wonder about the possibilities for Grace Hospital – certainly, a different set of issues, but at the very least, this is an interesting example of highlighting contentious spaces.

[via Groundswell Collective]

Danielle first wrote about the Gmail ad phenomenon a while ago — that is, how Google tries to place relevant ads by reading your emails and the curiosities that can arise from that technique.

So, the screenshot above is what Google thinks about an email regarding Broken City Lab, Bruce Mau, a revisited idea, and our new upcoming residency project.

Drawdio is a DIY music project by designer jay silver that let’s users draw the instrument of their choice on a piece of paper and play it with their finger.

While possible to use in a variety of  objects, when used with a pencil, the graphite acts as a circuit on the paper, transmitting the electric signal across the drawing to produce a different sound based on the specific form.

If you can get past the sort of hilarious / awkward editing in the video, it’s a very cool and simple design. It makes me curious about the potential for creating some kind of traceable sound-map, what sounds would Detroit’s streets make versus Windsor’s streets? What would happen if you added new roads or buildings — what sound could that make?

[via Designboom]

I’ve been collecting a bunch of great ideas lately, but haven’t had the time to post them, so I thought it was about time to get them up here, again as reference points, context, and markers for projects we’re hoping to do and general inspiration.

First off, an idea that Josh once imagined, in some fashion anyways, a green house made from recovered windshields.

In Toyko, a new shopping centre incorporates green roofs and triangular metal mesh that facilitates plant growth in a way that appears to extend off of the building.

Some product design students at the University of Oregon utilize a technique we’re very familiar with — fusing plastic bags — to create proposed temporary shelters, called the Utility Quilt.

A design proposal for powering your electronics with microbial fuel cells by Nectar Designs.

And finally, using trash to make a wifi network, MIT’s Bits and Atoms lab work in Afghanistan and teach local residents how to build their own.

All very cool projects, my favourites being the rather lo-fi technologies and solutions. It feels kind of like designing for the world of Mad Max, which maybe isn’t so far off from the way we’ll need to consider solutions under economic and environmental stresses.

Just a quick update from Sunday’s Save the City event: Sites of Apology / Sites of Hope … Thanks to the amazing group of people who turned out, we have nearly 50 sites between the two lists (which you can see in progress, above).

A part of this project involves us going around to each and every site on these lists and officially recognizing it as either a site of apology or a site of hope. Since we have 50 sites on our lists, we were beginning to run out of daylight on Sunday afternoon. That means that we only managed to visit about half of those sites, so we’re trying to find a second day to continue with our adventure.

We’ll post all of the photos from the event and a photo of every site we visit as soon as we finish!

The next Save the City event happens on March 20th, 2010 — more details soon.

Broken City Lab: Save the City is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

Not that we don’t already have our hands full, but seeing as it’s nearly March, we’re starting to look ahead to summer time activities. These activities might be somewhat related to this ongoing conversation we’ve been having on the blog.

We’ll be posting more information soon, but for now, just know that if you’ve been planning on visiting Windsor, you should try to keep your calendars open in July.

And, hope to see you SUNDAY, February 28th – 1pm at 362 California!

The epic adventure with Arduino, LCDs, and PHP continues. I’ve finally made some progress in terms of breaking up the words and lines appropriately. It felt like a huge achievement, since I had been trying to figure out this line-break thing for quite a while.

You can check the majority of the progress in the video below, and all of the steps along the way are below! Don’t mind the nonsensical example texts. So first off, I figured out I needed to send Arduino very specific information to know where to line break.

I used PHP wordwrap to break words appropriately, then sent Arduino a * to identify a line break.

Doing it this way also helped to make it more obvious where words needed to be wrapped, including when there was punctuation.

I used a SwitchCase to do some tests — I did this at first just to test to make sure the Serial port was receiving the appropriate information and to ensure that Arduino could act on receiving letters.

Then, I changed the code to be a bit to actually do what I needed it to do — in this case, set the cursor to the next line.

There was some trial and error along the way, the text wasn’t moving to the appropriate lines.

You can see, I was really just piecing this together from other code examples … but it turned out to help a lot and set the groundwork for this to work how I wanted.

Finally, the text being wrapped like it needed to!!!

A close up of the glory.

This code worked to print out each character.

Another random text, just to make sure this was working and not just a fluke.

I added some more switch cases to start identifying a page break, that is, spanning the text over two screens.

You can see here some of the testing I was doing in PHP.

And some more of the testing, having output into a browser so I could make sure that it was doing what I wanted it to.

And here’s the result — a 140 character message automatically spans across two screens and knows where to break words to span accordingly. Since then, I was speaking with Mike Beauchamp (ex-Windsorite / DIY tech genius) and he provided some interesting ideas in terms of how to work the communication portion of this project. Could be very useful, so I included a couple of those links below.

Next steps that I’ve already begun include working towards using PHP to parse a text file (I figure that’s one possibility to hold the text messages and Twitter tweets), or alternatively using an RSS feed to deliver both to the LCD (that is, assuming the email part of the text message configuration I’m currently considering could do that).

–

Annotated Bibliography

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/categories.php?c=66 (ideas from Mike Beauchamp)

http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1227581530/0 (ideas from Mike Beauchamp)

http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1264895784/9 (serial communication with PHP)

http://www.tizag.com/phpT/php-string-strpos.php (string position tutorial)

http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/TextString (potential to use Arduino rather than PHP for string manipulation)

http://www.tizag.com/phpT/fileread.php (open a text file and read data from it)

http://veritrope.com/tips/export-apple-mail-messages-and-notes-to-text-files/2 (export mail messages to text file)

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/878/check-google-e-mail-gmail-from-an-rss-feed/ (check gmail as rss feed)

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/03/feed-for-unread-gmail-messages.html (more info on gmail rss feeds, needs feed authentication)

http://davidwalsh.name/gmail-php-imap (php + imap + gmail output)

http://g33k.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/check-gmail-the-python-way/ (gmail + python)

http://www.hashbangcode.com/blog/disemvoweling-php-function-1077.html (disemvoewling PHP)

I would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for their generous support.

Day two of Create Here’s City Share Conference was just as busy as the first, but we got tons of work accomplished, and we were even able to take a short tour of the city at lunch!

After breakfast, we broke off into our groups once again.  We were still trying to come up with a definite plan on how to re-establish a relationship between Windsor and Detroit, so Sheldon drew up a little indirect/direct line graph.  The seed-bombs with attached love letter is on the far indirect side, our projections are in the middle, and getting passports to citizens is on the far direct side.

After a bit of brainstorming, we came up with a proposed solution of creating a youth exchange program between Windsor and Detroit.   This program ideally would improve cross-border relations for future generations of Windsor-Detroit residents by fostering civic pride, cultural awareness, and a sense of ownership over issues affecting both cities.

Bijan, Veronique and Michelle brainstorming some more before lunch.

During our lunch break, we headed down the road to catch the FREE shuttle that goes through the city, that also has FREE wi-fi!

Not to mention, the bus was also electric powered!

Carta bus.

On the bus, on our way to the river.

Downtown Chattanooga.

Bridge in front of the aquarium.

Chattanooga skyline.

Walnut street pedestrian bridge, which was closed for construction.

Michelle excited that she found some graffiti underneath the bridge.

Some Chattanooga history on the pedestrian bridge.

Tennessee river.

Walnut street bridge again.

Sculpture, and some nice looking, yet not very practical (as the Chattanoogans claim) stairs.

Another sculpture.

Hunter Art Museum.

Myself, taking photos, as per usual.

Hunter Art Museum.

Aquarium sculpture on another bridge.

We finally found some graffiti in Chattanooga on their bridge!

The Delta Queen.

Across the bridge is the entrance to Coolidge Park.

Leo’s Handmade Gallery resembled Windsor’s Made in Windsor store.

Drink coffee and Destroy.

Piano sculpture.

Building for sale.  Reduced price.

Everyone regrouping after lunch at the Create Here HQ.

The group working busily.  We decided that we wanted to engage two classes, one from each city, in a three month long arts-cased exchange that documents, discusses and contends with the border between Detroit and Windsor.

Jason, Maggie and Michelle working out more details.  The classes would comprise of around 20 students each (10-12 years in age) who will interact in a series of increasingly direct conversations.  A cornerstone of the project will also be to obtain passports for all participating students.  As a result, they’ll be able to participate in four cross-border exchanges and contribute to an art piece that lives in the neighboring city.

Leading up to those final four exchanges, members of Broken City Lab will team up with a similar organization in Detroit to serve as mentors for the classes. Broken City has expertise in developing public art pieces, planning workshops, and documenting processes so that they can be used by others. With this base of skills, Broken City will help the kids develop unique channels for communication with their student-neighbors. The classes will learn about the other city, but more importantly, will develop fluency in the issues facing their own.

The whole project starts with a bang. Given Broken City’s experience with projections, it seems that using this format to draw attention to the permeability (and permanence) of the border is a perfect fit. One idea? A cross-border game of tic-tac-toe projected on the riverfront.

A series of smaller projects will happen almost weekly. These will be specifically themed to engage an age group other than our own. We imagine they’d dig a game of pictionary done via snail mail; a guitar hero Skype tournament; the development of a Windsor/Detroit student Facebook group; even a simple act of skill-sharing via video or blog. But what matters most is finding ways to encourage communication between the students that is genuine, appropriate, and easy.

The name ideas we came up with are “Love, Your Neighbour” or possibly, “Love, Your Neighbo(u)r.”

Some of the barriers of this process include the obtaining of the passports, finding the proper time to run such a program (during the school year vs. in the summer), parental consent/support, finding a good partnership on the Detroit side, man-power (since we’re volunteer based), and of course, funding.

We’d be able to gauge the success of the project by the impressions of the home city/away city and the comfort level that is measured of the home/away city after the project is finished.

Meanwhile, Justin and Josh joined the Wichita group in brainstorming ideas of how they could reconnect their city as well.  They came up with a concept entitled, “Kiss & Tell” which would spark up some community revitalization within Wichita.

Working on their presentation.

Michelle and I giving the group our presentation on all of the work we accomplished over the past two days!

At the end of the conference, Josh, Michelle, Justin and I headed across the river and back to Sluggo’s for our last Chattanoogan meal.  We chatted about the conference and shared our different experiences. Being able to interact with so many like-minded individuals at the conference was such a huge opportunity for us.  We all learned a lot!  Thanks to all of our new American friends for teaching us so much, and to all of our old friends at Create Here for inviting us to participate in City Share!

Last Wednesday, Justin, Michelle, Josh and I flew from Detroit, MI to Atlanta, GA and drove another two hours to Chattanooga, TN for the City Share conference put on by our friends from Create Here!

Veronique picked us up from the the airport in Atlanta.  We grabbed a bit of food and then headed straight to the NPR station in Chattanooga to do a quick radio interview about our practice, and then we headed to our hotel for a much needed rest.

We took a quick nap before we went out for dinner.  This giant  parking garage was located across the street from our hotel.

We went out for dinner with the Create Here folk and some new friends from Charlottesville, VA at this cute vegan restaurant called Sluggo’s that’s owned by the Tennessee punk band This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb!

Michelle and Justin chatting with some friends near the end of the night.  Afterward, we all went back to the hotel and crashed for the night.  Long day, but we were eager for the conference the next day!

The next morning at the Create Here office.  Check out how busy our two days were!

Grabbing some delicious breakfast.

The main room of the office.  Everyone’s chatting and waiting for the introductory presentations.

After the presentations, we broke off into our cities and had some Create Here folk join us in brainstorming our city’s main problems.

Sheldon was our group leader.  He introduced us to the impact/urgency matrix which we used to figure out what problems we should focus on.

Trey, Michelle, Josh and Bijan brainstorming.

A happy looking group.

Michelle bringing up some great points no doubt!

Sheldon continuing to work on the matrix.

We decided that the relationship between Detroit and Windsor was the most interesting problem to focus on since there was a group from Wichita who mentioned a similar problem between the East and West sides of their city which is also separated by a river.  We hoped that some of their group could join our forces to collaborate on ideas to reconstruct these broken relationships!

Taking some notes down.  Michelle and I were appointed the “Champions” of our group and were asked to present our issue to the group once we reconvened with everyone.

Michelle and I presented and then it was lunch time!  Everyone had to fill out a ballot ranking which issues they found the most interesting, and fill out what assets they’d provide a group.

Josh went around and took some photos of the office space.  We got to ride those bikes around the neighbourhood a few times!  Also those giant yellow STAND letters are part of Create Here’s Pepsi Refresh campaign, “Stand & Deliver: Education.”

The print station!

I loved all of the exposed brick.  Definitely my favorite aspect of the office!

Some folk from Chicago and Charlottesville eating lunch!

Giant desk/work area.  Great for brainstorming sessions! I believe one of the groups took over this section of the office!

Art-o-Mat! Put in some coins and get “arists in cellophane!”

After lunch, we found out that our issue was voted as one of the issues to focus on, so Michelle and I broke into different groups with some Create Here, Charlottesville and Wichita friends.  Justin joined the Wichita group and Josh joined the Charlottesville group.

Michelle and Sheldon brainstorming an asset map.

Here’s our finished asset map of Windsor.  The blue arrows represent connections and the red dotted lines represent broken connections.

Continuing the brainstorming.

Michael, Sheldon, Veronique and Michelle still discussing.

After we broke out of groups for the day, we decided to walk back to our hotel and rest up a bit before dinner time.  It’s hard to make out, but there are paintings of trains all along the front of this building.

Some run down Chattanooga buildings.  Chattanooga is not much different than Windsor.

Cute art.  One thing Michelle noticed about Chattanooga right away was the fact that there is hardly any graffiti anywhere.

Chattanooga Choo Choo.  We kept noticing how dominant the red florescent lights were all around the city.  Much like Windsor’s Caesars sign.

Josh and I.

Chattanooga is filled with doers.

Michelle, Josh and Justin running toward this giant, painted American flag.

More bright red text.

Grand blvd, where our hotel was located.

Also just outside of our hotel.

We went back to the Create Here office to eat some dinner, have some fun and to chat with all of our new friends.  We were eager for day two and to get cracking on some ideas on how to build up a relationship with Detroit!  We didn’t come up with any concrete solutions by day one, but some of the ideas we came up with included creating hyperlocal tours of Windsor and Detroit for their respective citizens, creating a pen pal correspondence, giving the cities small presents such as seed bombs with notes attached and  youth exchange programs.