A Digital Park? - Post Column 13 Jul 04

A Digital Park?

The other week I went to a presentation organized by Birmingham Forward to hear about the Eastside development, and its showpiece library and City Park. Structurally the plans look magnificent, and as an occasional heavy user of the Central Library I’m still all for collections of paper books. However it did get me thinking about whether the site could also act as a showpiece for electronic communication for the city.

At its most basic the planners really ought to look at how WiFi coverage could be provided across the whole of the park. The great advantage of a laptop is being able to work outside when the weather is fine. If we can get Internet access over WiFi at the same time then even better. The new City Park would be an ideal place to just sit and work on a sunny day, and ideally soak up the buzz of what will hopefully be a vibrant part of the city.

Having got the infrastructure in place, we can then start to get really creative. When a laptop first makes a WiFi connection it displays a “splash” page, which usually just tells you how to log on and pay for your session. But in somewhere like the City Park this could become a piece of creative real-estate in its own right. Why not tie the page in to the part of the library you’re close to – humanities, sciences, travel or whatever? We can even start to leverage the community aspect and have the content driven by the number of other users in the area, or even what they are looking at.

And why stop at laptop users? I’m sure a local installation artist could develop some electronic billboards that could feed off the WiFi traffic to give an ever changing display – with due regard for the family nature of the park.

The ultimate could be something similar to that tried in the Nokia Game last year. There a virtual landscape was populated by display towers, and players could use a simple tool set to compose music and images to be played on these towers. Hunting the landscape for the tower with your designs on it became a popular sport. Why not do this for real?

Back in 1996 Cannon Hill Park hosted a stunning set of music installations at an event called 7/8th of a second which showed just what can be done with electronics in an open space. The one that sticks in the mind most was Mark Anderton’s installation with hundred speakers buried under the turf. These played music and even the sounds of a flock of sheep or a herd of cows as you walked through them. Perhaps local ambient artist Bobby Bird ought to be invited to do a piece.

In Bristol they’ve already woken up to the community possibilities of wireless technology. The Mobile Bristol project is a collaboration between the city, HP Labs, the DTI and others. It is an experimental test-bed for pervasive mobile media and the vision is of a “digital canvas over the city onto which rich situated digital experiences can be painted and new commercial ventures can be explored.” Oulo in Finland has a similar project. Even Liverpool is getting in on the act with the Interactive City event.

These sorts of projects are showing how high technology, and particularly wireless technology, can provide a clear signal of a go-ahead city culture, and gain media coverage to match. With a development such as Eastside it would be a pity if it became only a bricks and mortar development, and didn’t explore some of the exciting opportunities that wireless and information technologies could offer. I’d be interested to hear readers' thoughts.

David Burden is Marketing Director at Aseriti and can be contacted at david.burden@aseriti.com.