One Day In Detroit: Devils & Details Brainstorm 1: Tours, Lists, & Collections
The devil lives in the details, maybe doubly so in software and web design. When you’re trying to keep things simple, you’d be amazed at the tiny games of whack-a-mole that get played as you change one tiny thing that affects something else, and how one seemingly small decision to put something in or leave something out creates a legacy that takes things in a different direction, both in how people use something or don’t, and how they think about what it’s for.
As we attempt to exorcise the devil from the One Day In Detroit beta app, I’m going to try posting a tour a day for the next bit and talk through some issues and possibilities, walking right into the devil’s house. No need to knock, he knows we’re coming. Bastard always does.
The original itch to scratch with One Day is experiencing so many people coming to Detroit for just a day or two and asking over and over again, “What should we see? Where should we go?” You end up developing a standard playlist, typing, retyping, saying, re-saying, and eventually you just want to put it down and share it with everyone. For me, I’ve found myself giving the Whirlwind Sampler Plate Driving Tour a couple dozen times in the last year-ish.
But when you sit down with the app to make a tour, you’re really making a list. It’s a small step from creating curated “experience” tours where things should happen more or less in a certain order, and simply listing themed collections of things that are good to catalog, know about, and be able to choose to visit, but aren’t designed to be done in a day or in a certain order.
I’ll give a few examples.
Playing around, one of the first “tours” I made was really a list of all Detroit locations listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Well, truth be told, I paused after 49 because my typing fingers wept, but you get the idea. I think this is a *great* collection to have all in one place, and One Day makes it easy to compile and share, but it’s certainly not a tour per se.
Same thing with the statue “tour” I started piecing together. While seeing cool statues is a nice thing to do in the city, you’d have to be a pretty freaky dude to only stick to statues on your hypothetical day here (hey, man, I’m not judgin’, and maybe I’m wrong :-)).
And again same thing with the “tour” I just made of Hacker & Maker spaces in Detroit. Maybe you do want to check them all out in a day if you’re into that scene, but it feels like more of a List or Collection that grows over time as new things come online or are discovered.
These three “tours” also have something else in common. As lists/collections I’d love it if other people could add to them. It’s like you want the option to not just make a tour that you publish and control by yourself, but in addition to that, you want to start a list, and you want to be able to choose to make it locked or publicly editable.
As an example, wouldn’t it be cool to start a publicly editable collection of all public art works in Detroit? The kind where someone who finds a new piece of graffiti can easily add its location to the set? Imagine this for all sorts of interesting things. Then perhaps an aspect of proper Tour creation becomes picking and choosing locations from collections to put in a certain experiential order.
Thing is, if that’s not the firm direction, a seemingly small change forks the app into something like “Find and share things worth doing” and “Catalog and explore everything.”
I don’t know man, I just work here. :-) If anyone has thoughts, let us know at team@makeloveland.com and I’ll share them with Dandelion and Skidmore too.
More devils tomorrow, and everyday for the rest of your life… :-0
One Day In Detroit: User-Generated Tour App Beta
Check it out! We just softly rolled the One Day In Detroit beta app onto the open internets. Over the past 6 weeks or so we’ve been working in a fun little collaboration with our friends at Dandelion Detroit and Skidmore Studio to think and design through the possibilities.
Here’s the skinny on where it’s at right now. On the homepage, if you press the circle it pulls up nearby locations that have been featured in tours. More on that in a sec…
Scrolling down we’ve got a section for Featured Tours, which can rotate depending on what’s going on in town and what new awesomeness gets posted (you can, of course, also search for tours and locations, pull up the full list, and sort by different attributes):
Tours are ordered lists of places with descriptions, addresses, imagery, and driving directions:
Every tour also has its own map. There’s also a Places page that shows the locations of all tour stops in one “global” citywide view. This is a screenshot from when you press the circle button on the homepage. It zeros in on you and shows you things that are closest and what tour it came from, if you want to stumble into something while on the go:
Tour creation is mercifully straight forward. Right now you name your tour, describe it, and start posting locations (name, address or cross streets, short descriptions, and a photo).
You can also say how long it probably takes and whether its best to drive, walk, or bike.
We would LOVE to hear your thoughts on this. It definitely scratches an itch, especially in Detroit, a particularly mysterious city. But as always, the devil loves living in the details. One little irritation or counter-intuivity (<— new word) can spoil the whole soup, and there’s a ways to go to nail it.
Hit the LOVELAND team at team@makeloveland.com if and when the spirit moves you, and by all means please try it out, make a little tour, and let us know how it goes.
I’m going to start posting a tour of the day while talking through some design issues, ideas, observations, questions, what-if’s, etc. Good people, good times.
Fun With Texting: DetroitSoccer.us
Larry’s been gaining mastery over the world of group text messaging for some upcoming projects, and we just put up a simple text subscription service for people who want to follow neighborhood teams in the Detroit City Futbol League, and the minor league Detroit City Futbol Club, Le Rouge.
The way it works is you text “Follow <team #>” to 313-499-0940 and on game days you get a text early in the day with who, where, and when they’re playing, along with where the after party is, then afterwards you get the score. That’s it. Just a fun, easy way to stay in the loop.
The texts look something like this (this is for the minor league team, all other games are free):
We also posted a little city map showing neighborhoods with teams:
If you’re a player or a fan (or a possible fan), we hope you like.
Techno Viking Says Sorry For The Radio Silence
Been working hard in the lab on new releases. Reminded of this internet classic from across the ages while attending the Movement festival over Memorial Day weekend:
Apr 08
Microhoods: Small, Cheap, & Under Control?
Too long, didn’t read: LOVELAND’s working on a system that divides Detroit into many small sections that people with local knowledge can easily explore and update information about. Put the many small sections (AKA Microhoods) together, hold your face a foot away, stare into the distance, and a city comes into focus.
Surprise surprise. LOVELAND Technologies has cleared off some desk space in the lab to start piecing together a new crowdsourced map app called Microhoods. It’s another theme-and-variation on our mapping work like Living In The Map, Why Don’t We Own This?, the Call To Action service map, Site Control, etc.
The basic need is this: Detroit is massive (140 square miles) and has massively widespread disinvestment, vacancy, and the attendant problems that come with that. Really, this is all so massive (massively massive) that many people write the city’s problems off as intractable, and who can blame them? As the city has shrunk from 2 million people to 700,000, at least 1/3 of the city is empty and untended, there are more than 45,000 unintentionally government-owned properties, and 70,000 empty structures.
On top of that there is no good way to keep live record of the situation on the ground (data doesn’t exist or gets old fast), share problems and opportunities (what’s broken, blighted, empty, and/or ready for change?), and invite support for existing projects as well as investment (who’s working on what or wants what where?).
If we wanted to start attacking those problems in order it would go something like:
• Create a system whereby areas of the city are more manageably sized
• Share as much information as is already known about these places
• Invite people to contribute their on-the-ground knowledge of what’s going on (or not going on) where
• Encourage people to advertise opportunities to help and invest (including plugging in and pointing to people fundraising, volunteering, selling property, etc on various other services)
OK. If you squint your mind’s eye at the problem with us, you can see the outline of a possible solution.
Larry’s whipped up an interactive grid of the city based on 1/2 mile by 1/2 mile areas (AKA microhoods). They run A - Z from north to south (how convenient) and 1 - 30-something west to east.
When you drill down to a microhood you get all the parcels that comprise it, a way to toggle layers of information on and off (want to see property ownership? all local block clubs and service organizations? local projects and fundraisers? user-generated content?), update-able survey questions, and a way to say what’s really happening on any parcel.
Over the Easter weekend I’ve been poking around the alpha site making notes. From across the years a mantra came back to mind: “fast, cheap, and out of control.” MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks coined the phrase in an essay back in 1989, proposing a new way to explore other planets using swarms of cheap decentralized robots. What we’re thinking about with Microhoods might be surprisingly similar in some ways, but instead of swarms of robots exploring distant planets, it’s crowds of people exploring Detroit.
Some fun with remixes, here’s the short introduction to the 1989 essay with inerspliced with microhood updates in bold:
Fast, Cheap And Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of The Universe
Small, Cheap, & Under Control: A People’s Inventory of Detroit
Complex systems and complex missions take years of planning and force launches to become incredibly expensive.
Complex top-down urban planning projects take years and become incredibly expensive both financially and politically.
The longer the planning and the more expensive the mission, the more catastrophic if it fails.
The longer the planning and the more expensive the mission, the less responsive to changes on the ground, the more detached from residents, and the more disheartening if it fails.
The solution has always been to plan better, add redundancy, test thoroughly and use high quality components.
The solution has always been add multiple review boards, triple-check the data, test thoroughly against precedents in other places, and use high quality contractors.
Based on our experience in building ground based mobile robots (legged and wheeled) we argue here for cheap, fast missions using large numbers of mass produced simple autonomous robots that are small by today’s standards (1 to 2 Kg).
Based on our experience in building city mapping and crowdsourcing software (desktop and mobile) we argue here for cheap, fast missions using large numbers of ordinary people equipped with local knowledge, laptops, smartphones, and pen-and-paper.
We argue that the time between mission conception and implementation can be radically reduced, that launch mass can be slashed, that totally autonomous robots can be more reliable than ground controlled robots, and that large numbers of robots can change the tradeoff between reliability of individual components and overall mission success.
We argue that the time between mission conception and implementation can be radically reduced, that budgets can be slashed, that passionate residents and volunteers can be more reliable and informed than paid professionals, and that large numbers of contributors can change the tradeoff between reliability of any individual contributions and overall mission success.
Lastly, we suggest that within a few years it will be possible at modest cost to invade a planet with millions of tiny robots.
Lastly, we suggest that within a couple years it will be possible at modest cost for millions of people to meaningfully invest in a renewed Detroit that makes sense on a sustainable local level.
—-
Like everything, to be continued…
PS I also recommend checking out the Errol Morris film “Fast, Cheap, & Out of Control” that features Rodney Brooks and 3 other…obsessively curious and dedicated people:
Apr 05
One Day In Detroit Progress
The One Day In Detroit user-generated tour guide app is starting to look pretty slick. Still a ways to go, but it’s functional and simple. We’ve grown our little group of alpha testers and udate-getters to around 30 and have a narrow stream of sweet tours trickling in. If you want to join the group, hit me at jerry@makeloveland.com. Here’s a screenshot of the current look on an iPad:
The Motor City Mark Zuckerberg?
Details magazine recently ran a piece on some interesting projects in Detroit, including LOVELAND. In it they call me “The Motor City Mark Zuckerberg.” As I’ve sheepishly told my friends, better than “known idiot.” :-) I’ll take it, though we’re nothing without Larry the Shadow Zuckerberg:
Knight Grant
I’m happy and honored to say that LOVELAND received a modest but awesome $7,500 grant from the Knight Foundation to work with our friend James Feagin for making some new realtime collective action tools and organizing some city events.
Purpose: LOVELAND Technologies will help build a technological and organizational infrastructure so that more Detroiters are able to gather more quickly in large-scale community settings. The Imagine Detroit Together initiative works to promote barrier-free thinking and collaborative engagement in Detroit. Combining innovative use of technology with grassroots organizing, this initiative aims to help Detroiters reach across backgrounds to execute large-scale demonstrations of unity. Support will allow LOVELAND to build technology and a database that allows Detroiters to communicate with and see one another in real time on a city map.
Juuust mysterious enough. :-) We have some cool surprises in store for this one…
i want to pause and express infinite gratitude to all the loveland teammates and collaborators and inchvestors and angels and clients and friends and fans and backers and constructive critics and everyone who’s helped and supported us in anyway along our bootstrapped adventure so far and into the future. amen. attempting to innovate at the edges is never easy, and detroit provides its own ups and downs along the way on top of that, like riding 2 super-imposed roller coaster tilt-a-whirls at once. but! i believe we’re truly doing something special and important together that’s bearing fruit over time as a movement and set of ideas that’s bigger than a product. and so i want to say thank you for the love and the ride. ♥
