This is the second installment of "The Social Life of Ogoglio City" which I began in this post.
Sitting Space
Different plazas in NYC had varied use, with some plazas regularly populated and some regularly deserted. The aesthetic value of the nearby buildings were ignored, since most attention was paid at eye level. There was no correlation between popularity and open space, shape of plaza, or amount of sunlight.
Though later chapters address the qualities Whyte discounts here, consider that the most visible aspects of a social space might have little to do with its capability to encourage use. I'm not focusing my design or development efforts on the most visible aspect of most 3spaces, advanced graphics. This is partly a result of my disinterest in mathematical or computational chest thumping, which is what you'll find if you read most 3space advertisements or spec sheets. Also, by releasing the prototype from the need to use high end hardware acceleration it can be used by people with older systems.
People tend to sit most where there are places to sit. The square feet of sitting space in the best-used plazas ran between 6 and 10 percent of the total open space, and the linear feet of seating often equalled the length of the perimeter.
I recently attended a meeting in Second Life where we used a seating system which started with two seats around a low coffee table. Each time a person sat down another seat would appear from nowhere and the seats would rearrange themselves into a wider circle around the table. No matter how many people sat down there was always room for more and I could always see all of the other seated people without needing to crane my point of view.
Reactive plazas can scale seating and other social props on demand but to create that demand programmatic spaces should invite sitting and walking conversations by littering the place with obvious seating (and triangulation points, which are discussed in a later chapter).
Sitting should be physically comfortable, but more important is social comfortable, and that means choice: up front or in back, in the sun or in the shade, alone or in groups.
Using a small rectangle of changing pixels to communicate a sense of a place can be quite tricky. Add to that trick the need to communicate multiple choices of social settings within a small area like a plaza and you end up with a complex system beyond human comprehension. Take the simple problem of how far your utterances travel in a 3space plaza. If I say "Rainy enough for ya?" to the woman working the coffee stand in Pioneer Square I'm pretty sure that my voice won't carry more than a few feet. But if I'd like to have a conversation while walking through the center of an Ogoglio City district how do I know who can hear me? If eat carrots while eating lunch on a bench off to one side of a major street, will everyone within sight hear the crunch?
The use of zoning ordinances: "Most zoning ordinances are very, very specific as to what the developer gets. The trouble is that they are mushy as to what he is to give, and mushier yet as to what will happen if later he doesn't. What you do not prescribe quite explicitly, you do not get."
and
"Once an architect has to start thinking of ways to make a place sittable, it is virtually impossible not to surpass the minimum [code requirement]."
One of my basic premises is that planned, finite urban density in a 3space has much more value than uncontrolled, limitless sprawling freedom. What, then, is the role of the planner? How will ordinances be written, updated, and enforced? Sections of the city will eventually be owned and operated by companies other than Transmutable, so what part will they play in the planning process?
Oh, wait. This is a chapter on sitting space. Focus.
You can calculate where pedestrian flow bisects a sittable place, and that is where people will most likely sit.
In order to facilitate pedestrian flow Ogoglio City must provide window displays, people-watching as a pastime, and the possibility of recognizing neighbors. But more importantly, there must be value for a person to leave their online office and venture out to another part of the city. Not everyone is an adventurer, and fewer still are online adventurers. People will join the pedestrian flow in Ogoglio City when they can drive less by joining, when they can spend more time with their kid by joining, or when joining is simply more interesting than getting up from the computer.
"Benches are artifacts, the purpose of which is to punctuate architectural photographs."
Oh, snap!
"They do worst when they freeze them [benches] in concrete permanence. Rarely will you ever see a plan for a public place that even countenances the possibility that parts of it might not work well: that calls for experiment and testing, and for post-construction evaluation."
One might believe that a fully observable environment like Ogoglio City would naturally lead to a well instrumented place with attentive social managers. Sadly, history does not bear this out. I have it on good authority that when game researchers approach MMO companies and ask what sorts of statistical analysis they do on the social aspects of their communities, you could hear a pin drop. Most MMOs track their population and economic data, but they wouldn't notice if suddenly every guild elected new leadership unless there was a flame war about it in the official forum.
Being a novice, I assume that I need to look for opportunities to pave the cow paths instead of laying down a Grand Central Plan. Being a web engineer, I have opinions on how to gather and manipulate information. Being an open source weenie, I hope that while I'm learning how to find the cow paths that others will be learning along with me.
Movable chairs: Small moves say something. If a newcomer chooses a chair next to a couple, he may make intricate moves indicating "Sorry about the closeness, but I am going to respect your privacy, as you will mine."
This is the essence of personal space in dense environments; the signal that though we're together here we're keeping to ourselves for a bit. I grew much more comfortable moving around on public transit in San Francisco when I discovered that by wearing sunglasses and headphones I felt like everyone was giving me an extra foot of personal distance, though we were actually no further apart. In Ogoglio City there will be times when we'll need to pull up our hoods and scoot our chair a foot away, and other times we'll need to sit next to each other on benches and chat about politics. We're people with moods and the city should react.
The next chapter is "Sun Wind Trees and Water", which I will address in a future post.
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