As presented to lead a discussion at the first ever OpenCities conference held in Toronto, June 2007. moar: http://thomaspurves.com http://opencities.ca

1. Dead Media & The Flavour of Cities The meme is the message A discussion led by Thomas Purves http://opencities.ca http://thomaspurves.com Open Cities Conference, Toronto, 2007

2. Two Modern Spaces

3. WTF?

4. WTF?

5. Mediums behave like memes In that they propagate by their own rules. Proppaging through society like waves

6. Forces of Media: economics game theory snowball effects innovation culture choice -can you name others? -

7. Catch: Any new media always obsolesces an old

8. dead media always has some particular flavor, some character that is always lost

11. Dead flavours are also an opportunity. Retrieval.

12. Dead flavour

13. Sometimes we miss old flavours

14. Sometimes we don’t The black death as a flavour of medieval cities.

15. Cars! e.g. Long lasting and unexpected flavours implications

16. Good Freedom, mobility, picking up chicks.

17. Externalities are also flavours Bad

18. Ugly

19. Just Arbitrary There’s many slightly arbitrary ways to design a streetlight

20. Debatable

21. The Region of Awesome The Zone of the Possible

22. Changes in Media reshape the zone of the possible The Region of Awesome The Zone of the Possible

23. Flavour Shift The Region of Awesome The Zone of the Possible 1890 The Zone of the Possible 2007

24. Further Complications Land of Suck The Region of Awesome The Zone of the Possible (great sea of indifference)

25. Flavour loss of the industrial age.

26. Rising costs of labour Rising costs of craftmanship Prefabrication and standardization bring advantages at the cost of flavour (how much has this affected our culture’s sense of aesthetic?)

27. What flavours will “Open” bring?

28. Complimentary 3D House Printing Side effects? Nothing has to be prefab. Organic designs. Changing the shape of the possibility space

29. Emergence is a flavour of open design

30. Quality or Crap?

31. Discussion

32. Carbon-trading system for ugly? Managing Flavour