Systems/Layersby Nurri Kim & Adam Greenfield, Diffusion Transformations, March 2011 (Download A4 | US Letter PDF 5.3Mb Read Online):

Around the world, urban form and metropolitan experience are being transformed by the presence of networked computation. The urban fabric and discrete elements in it are newly empowered to capture, process, transmit, display and even act on information. At the same time, our daily tactics of doing and being — practices of citying that have remained invisible throughout recorded history, and have generally been lost to that history — are now being rendered explicit and gathered up by that same network.

Nurri Kim and Adam Greenfield of Do projects have run “walkshops” devoted to exploring these transformation and their consequences in cities worldwide. Through the Transformations series, they offer Systems/Layers, a quick guide to running a walkshop for yourself, covering the particulars of choosing a terrain, knowing what to look for, recruiting participants, and promoting your event.

Nurri Kim, co-founder of Do projects and author of Tokyo Blues (2009), is an artist who is interested in exploring the narratives hidden in the ephemeral routines of everyday life. You can see her work at nurri.com.

Adam Greenfield, managing director of New York City-based urban systems design practice Urbanscale, is author of Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing (2006) and the forthcoming The City Is Here For You To Use.