—

Describe this week in one image?

Juha: release of Zero History for the Moon Life Concept Store.

Boris: Old & New, Warm, Thinking, Wait for it, GO!

Where did you get most of your news this week?

Juha: Twitter first, the Guardian second.

Boris: Flipboard for the iPad, an amazing app which turns all of the news you consume into one easy to read magazine format. Giving a zero-resistance way for me to view content from all kinds of sources, curated by Flipboard, my Facebook and twitter contacts and rss feeds from more obscure sources. I will try to write a blog post for De toekomst van de krant about Flipboard, I promise.

Which person would you recommend following on Twitter?

Juha: @cottam for odd futures, @failedarchitect for what went wrong with architecture, @benhammersley for, well, mostly silly jokes.

Boris: @benhammersley - Maybe the best and funniest alternative technology/futurology news source available. Next level thinking combined with some of the best traditionally prepared English humour.

What do you think of the new Facebook overhaul, and while you are at it, the Spotify integration?

Juha: Interesting. I installed the new timeline by following the developer’s instructions and I must admit I am impressed with the overall design. The ticker is another interesting addition, but not uncontroversial. The ticker shows you what your friends are doing and liking all over Facebook. It’s part ambient conversation, par social spyware. There are good sides, but there appear to be as many bad ones too (1, 2). The Spotify integration is probably a huge development for the music industry. Spotify, and with it the musicians and labels, have gained a potential of 800 million new listeners. The cloud music service has gained over 2 million subscribers since the Facebook integration was announced at f8.

Boris: I think it’s amazing how Facebook managed to reimagine the idea of the profile, next to Juha’s new shiny profile mine looks like it was written on the back of the Dead Sea scrolls. Although I have some serious doubts about some of the privacy implications (I listen to things on Spotify I would’nt want the world to know) and think we need to pay some attention to how we handle this the new profile is going to be huge for the way we consume social news, discover music and recognise social weather.

You both organised something on Wednesday. How was it?

Juha: I organised De toekomst van de krant, the future of the newspaper. It was awesome, thanks for asking. We watched the first part of News War, the PBS documentary about the crisis in the American newspaper industry. After the movie, I interviewed Volkskrant journalist Hans Aarsman, about his thoughts on the subject. He was joined by an engaged audience of media professionals from Het Financieel Dagblad and nu.nl. We had a great talk about the role of newspapers, and the need for innovative and disruptive thinking from within the news distribution model.

Boris: I organised the first editorial meeting with everyone working for VPRO Dorst announcing the changes we are going for on the short and the long term, and to give everyone a long overdue refresher about what our values are and why we exist. The group was huge, we were suprised that when we ordered pizza for everyone no one called to ask if we where sure, the pizzas even arrived on time, this made everyone a bit quiet at first but the heated discussions and inspired that followed where surely worth everything.

I used this meeting and the update I prepared to straighten everything out in our vision and mission, and update what our core values mean. So with renewed ideas and direction, VPRO Dorst moves into the future!

Did you meet anyone interesting this week?

Juha: Yes, I had a wonderful lunch with Lorenzo de Rita of the Soon Institute, one of the most charming and creative men in Amsterdam. I loved his idea of publishing a book of an Italian artist that consists of three years of wiretapping records of his convicted criminal father.

Boris: I just met Lorenzo de Rita, someone I think all of us would like to get close to Non-fiction. A bit surreal though since this morning I rewatched his interesting Picnic talk The Best City Never Seen, and wouldnt have expected to see him in real life immediately afterwards.

Are books still relevant in your life?

Juha: Yes sir! I am glad I am still a reader, however difficult it sometimes remains to find the time or the concentration. I am currently reading A Brief History of the Future by Jacques Attali and The Death of the Adversary by Hans Keilson. I should finish the novel in one stretch, but I got distracted by the book with the great title. I haven’t tried an e-reader yet, also because of the tactile sentiments books still have. But I am sure it will happen soon.

Boris: I don’t read. There are two reasons for this: the first is that I am dyslectic and/or lazy and not I don’t want to plow through a gazillion pages filled with symbols; the other is that I hate stuff, and books tend to at some point transform themselves into clutter in one of the corners of my bedroom.

Luckily there are two solutions for this. The solution for the second problem is easy: eBooks, eReaders and eDistribution. The release of the new Amazon Kindles must make this more within reach, but my iPad also functions fine for reading shorter texts.

The solution to my dyslexia/lazyness is audiobooks. Audiobooks give an experience somewhere between being told a story or interesting concept at a fireplace in a romantic wooden cabin and Kuedo’s new album Severant. The problem with this is that a lot of interesting books (Everyware by Adam Greenfield for instance) do not get released as audiobook. Still a lot of beautiful books are available. I recommend writers with great voices like Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion or narrators with great sense of language like the reading of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Stephen Fry.

How about movies?

Juha:  Oh yes. Cinemas are a thing to cherish. My favourite ones in Amsterdam are the Movies and Kriterion. I miss visiting Lantaren/Venster in Rotterdam, but I promise to get over it.

Boris: I love movies, and keep meticulous ratings on everything I see and a complete list of everything I want to see soon. I find documentairy movies to be a great kickstarter for rapid thinking and cinema films great for getting wild ideas and inspiration.

How is the new office?

Juha: It is awesome. You should all come by for a drink on Fridays at 6. We have quite a view.

Boris: Wow, I could live here and I probably would if Juha would just let me move in here. The view, the sounds, the atmosphere and in a few weeks the other tenants will make this the single best office in all of Amsterdam, I’m convinced.

I am delighted and honoured to have received an invitation to give a presentation at the Cognitive Cities Conference in Berlin this weekend. I will talk about my experiences with VURB and the no longer fictional dimension of the networked city. The line up of this conference is impressive, with Adam Greenfield (Urbanscale), Warren Ellis (author) and Matt Biddulph (data strategy Nokia) amongst many interesting people. It will be moderated by Wired Editor at Large Ben Hammersley.

My contribution will be the personal history of a heavy user of the city and its public spaces, and a visiting member of the different tribes of users of the built environment. I have been fortunate to have been hanging out with inspiring people that have been passing through Amsterdam in the past years. Combined with my own interest in how public spaces work and how people make decisions to go about the city, this should hopefully result in a gonzo-journalist portrayal of Amsterdam as an interactive city.

Many thanks to the organisation for this invitation, I look forward to seeing you all in Berlin this weekend.

For the January edition of Time Out (magazine) Amsterdam our office for cultural innovation Non-fiction was asked to give a vision of the city in the year 2020, together with KesselsKramer, LAgroup, Concrete and Benthem Crouwel. Since we discard the idea of a blueprint for the city of the future and strongly believe in the power of co-creation and collaboration, we invited a few dozen of people we know and/or admire to to speculate on the future of the city (of Amsterdam). By juxtaposing perspectives from both in- and outsiders and by combining utopian visions, critical reflections, personal fantasies and (more) mundane thoughts, we wanted to provide a kaleidoscopic view of the future of the Dutch capital.

We had been given a two-page spread (basically two A4 pages) to present our vision of the future and in order to maximise the number of ideas we invited our friends and colleagues across the globe to answer a simple question: “What will you be doing in Amsterdam in 2020?”, in 140 characters. A Twitter-message from the future. As we are moving into the next decade, Twitter is at the very front of communications innovations, and gathering all these tweets into a tweetdeck gives a recognizable and playful collaborative vision of the city (of Amsterdam) in 10 years.

The final result (thanks to our buddies at Vandejong) is a densely packed information-grid, giving an overview of 36 seemingly unrelated opinions and doom scenarios. But upon closer inspection fascinating patterns appear: our participants think that Amsterdam eventually will merge into a bigger metropolitan area, that it will suffer severe flooding, that the historic city centre will become an abandoned open-air museum and that the outskirts will become the new hubs of urban vitality and (re-)development.

In contrast, there are also people who hold a unique believe that by 2020 the city will be either connected to Utrecht by a high speed electro-magnet train, will still lack a new art museum or subway line, or simply will be and stay the ‘same old, same old’.

The magazine just hit the stores, so check it out or contact us if you wish to receive a copy! And please join us for the ‘2020 vision’ event at De Verdieping on Thursday 28 January at 8 pm in collaboration with Time Out Amsterdam, bringing together the contributors and other visionaries to discuss the propability of our predictions…

We wish to thank all the contributors and the people who are still sending us their submissions. We are very happy with the outcome of this collaborative effort. In the new year we will continu this ‘crowdsourced’ investigation into the future potentials and failures of a complex city.

.

We are in the last day of our Time Out Amsterdam Future City tweet aggregation, and have been enthused by the imaginative, witty and sometimes harsh messages from the future. Artist Aaron Koblin hopped off the 5 minute electro-magnet train from Utrecht, transcontinental VURB founder Ben Cerveny printed 30 bikes and discovered that the floating polder Almere III had been altered by the residents (again), and ubicompuman Adam Greenfield is upset he needs to pay 100k to get into Europe.

The answers to our question “What are you doing in Amsterdam in 2020?” are coming from all sides of the planet, from Winy Maas and Friedrich Von Borries to Radna Rumping and Nalden. You are still welcome to join us in building our collaborative Twitteropolis. But hurry, our deadline is Monday morning. So according to you, what is happening in Amsterdam in 2020?