Public Things Network is a new experiment in the 'share economy', mapping public furniture, tools, and objects in real-time as they move through the city. These collective, public things elicit shared experience and joyful gatherings, and they imagine the future of the 'smart city' as a space of distributed and responsive systems living outside of the structures of capitalism and private ownership.
Public Things Network is simultaneously hi-tech and lo-tech -- digital and physical. Physically, it is a collection of colorful and whimsical tools, toys, and furniture. They invite you to play with them, use them, and gather and disperse them to where they're desired. Digitally, the objects are tracked in real-time as they move, creating an on-demand map of un-ownable things which can be found and used on-demand.
Emerging networked technology is too often deployed in the service of surveillance and profit. Public Things Network imagines its use instead for mutual resource and playful exploration of our cities. Committed to open-source structures and collaborative experiences, the project proposes a new ethos of ‘smart’ infrastructure, beyond surveillance, profit, and privatization. We will use real-time geolocation and mapping to ask questions of collective maintenance, shared knowledge, ownership, and mutual aid.
Public Things Network is inspired by the artistic-political legacies of movements like Provo, the Situationists, and the Diggers. The project builds on radical work such Provo ‘white plans’ of collective goods (housing, bicycles, etc), rethought through twenty-first century technology. It opens up our imagination of the future 'smart city' as one of greater equity, community, and access.
With thanks to Vivian Easley