You may have noticed some odd stickers popping up around NYC…

Under the Level seeks to bridge the cities of New Orleans and New York by providing visual interventions on the streets of New York City and within an online environment that provoke a wider spread consciousness about the situation New Orleans is currently facing post-Katrina, worsening global environmental conditions, and a means to rebuild the Lower 9th Ward through donations to the Lower 9th Ward Homeowner’s Association.

Adam Simon had always been curious about those sneakers he saw see hanging on power-lines. And while most people would just shrug and go about their days, Adam saw them as a platform for a pretty cool urban hack - to house location-specific distributed torrent-seeders. The project is tentatively called Jonny Torrentseed, and is an ongoing exploration for ITP’s Urban Computing class.

Caroline Woolard’s Have a Seat was one of the stand-out projects at Conflux2006, a local NYC conference on urban living and exploration. Woolard’s concept is simple, and so is her realization - providing public seating where public seating is needed and doesn’t exist. The seating is easily attached to existing poles on the sidewalk, and provides an adequate resting-spot for the weary city-goer.

Have a Seat is a refreshing take on urban hacking, providing a great and sometimes much-needed service to urbanites in NYC.

More of Caroline’s work can be seen at her website.

NYU’s intensely creative, collaborative, forward-thinking Interactive Telecommunications graduate program seems the perfect venue for a class on Urban Computing — so it’s no surprise that students lobbied to get Everyware author Adam Greenfield and Area/Code’s Kevin Slavin to teach such a class. The class is now just finishing up it’s debut semester, with students rushing to finish final projects.

The class worked it’s way through basic urban explorations, focusing on a broadening scope - from the doors, windows, and walls, to streets, crossroads, and markets. Students were asked to react to each level of the urban structure, to explore the possibilities and a deeper meaning than one would normally find merely existing or traveling through an urban space. Students were required to imagine two interventions and present them as projects, with a final, more realized project drawing on one or both of the first two.

Projects thus far have varied in scale, scope, and intent. Iltrish presented a proposal for a new torrent-based market. Mike Dory imagined the urban street-scape rich with sounds, melodies, compositions from an army of little networked audio-modules. Catherine Coleman and Steven Jackson focused on creating a platform for the victims of Katrina in New Orleans, an online and mobile space for victims to tell stories, to spread knowledge, to gain empowerment through having a voice.

hack the planet

intro presentation [pdf]