Designing the Intelligent Public Way???

The Designing the Intelligent Way process was initiated by Meridian Design Associates & David Isenberg  in November of 2008 in response to our concern that America's standing processes of urban design and community, commercial and economic development had yet to add consideration of the new public rights-of-way conveying Information and Communications Technology into the spectrum of consideration in comprehensive planning.

We were also concerned that the visionaries and businesses inventing and deploying ICT infrastructure, resources and products were doing so as though their medium was deploying in an ecosystem separate from the communities all of us inhabit.

We'd noticed that America's trusted and beloved Ma Bell was long dead, and that many communities hadn't noticed that they could no longer rely on her to do the right thing when it came to designing the communications systems we depend on.  These same communities needed to prepare themselves for a whole different type of dialectic with Ma Bell's successor incumbents.

Just as this new nervous system is a new capability evolving within our living communities, so our cultural dialogue and design processes now need to find ways to discuss, plan and shape this new digital right-of-way, and the mediated spaces it provides the world access to.

So, we thought we'd get on about it.  We invited a growing list of people from the worlds of ICT visioning, design,  community media, academia, etc.,  to a series of salons and to participation in 2 web collaboration sites.

The first was a general exploration of the issues at hand.

The second was an exploration of the practical application of these ideas on the borough of the Bronx in NYC.

The Salon process has been on hiatus for some time, however its participants have been very busy doing just what the process set out to do - experiment with practical steps to assure that the deployment of this new infrastructure and these new cultural capabilities serves the broad public interest.

Many of the participants in the DIPW process will be present at Fiber Fete sharing what they've been up to.

Elsewhere on this blog you'll find some examples of just such undertakings.

If you would like to participate in the renewed salon process and related collaboration sites, just me me know - bice@meridiandesign.com.