DIYCity Chicago
I saw a post on BoingBoing tonight that referenced a (fairly new?) community called DIYCity
From their site:
Intro: How do you want to reinvent your city?
Twitter bots, aggregators, social software, mobile apps – we use these things more and more in our daily routines to make our lives better. But can we also use them to remake our cities altogether? How can these technologies be applied to transform urban spaces, changing them from the centralized, hard-coded things they are today into finely-tuned, fluid, user-operated systems that are efficient, sustainable and fit for life in the 21st century?
DIYcity is a place where people figure these things out by actually building and launching applications that address the problems around them
Wow – What a mandate! Re-inventing your city (Chicago, in my case) … hell yeah, count me in! I was really excited to find that a DIYChicago group had already been created.
In retrospect, it seems so obvious, no? People getting together using their pooled skills and creativity for the collective good. Kind of like saving the world, but on a much more manageable scale. In fact, I think that the city is the perfect scale for this kind of endeavor. Not too large as to make any effort moot, but also large enough to actually make a difference on a local, national, and perhaps even international scale.
One of the things I was unexpectedly surprised with about Chicago when I moved was how progressive it was – there seems to be a pervasive undercurrent here around eating local, using less or greener energy, and giving back via community service. DIYCity promises a community of progress-minded individuals aiming to solve these problems (and others) using any combination of freely-available technologies which already play some role in our daily lives. I’m eager to see how Chicago’s creative community (which seems to be huge!) – and the loosely coupled sectors of art, design and technology – will converge to confront the issues that confront this beautiful city, this hog-butcher of the world, this city of big shoulders, this … oh? Ok, right. I’ll stop now.
As a designer, I (not-so) secretly fantasize about saving the world, or at least making it a better place to live. I think about the almost-elemental power of design and the capacity is has to solve countless problems. And then I think about the problems that I solve on a daily basis: How many thumbnail images can I fit in this area? How can I make this marketable? How can I ensure that you don’t have to touch the screen too many times to accomplish task a? Or log in twice?
Not that these aren’t interesting problems – some of them are quite challenging. It’s just a matter of context. If the ultimate goal of all this expended brainpower is to ensure that someone can watch YouTubes anytime, and has access to all their friends, all their email and all their photos from anywhere, then, even when put in only a modicum of perspective, doesn’t it all seem at best, just a little bit frivolous?
I hope that DIYCity will provide a forum for applying design thinking to problems for which the solutions stand not only to make people’s lives more convenient, but genuinely better.
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