creative

Geotagged Flickr photography in and around Hyde Park in London. Sights with visibly high levels of activity include the Serpentine, the museums in Exhibition Road. Image John Davies Into the city In the past, people walked the streets and left no trace. This is no longer true. We are creating large amounts of data about the places around us: how we move through them, and how they move us. One source of this data has been the growth in smart phone and social media use....

Geotagged photos in central London, John Davies. Image based on the locations of over a million geo-tagged photos on Flickr by 38,255 photographers or, at least, photo accounts. Social media data, such as that produced by Twitter and Facebook use, is opening up new ways to understand society, but how do people obtain this data, and what are the challenges in using it to learn about our lives? API days...

Locations of geo-tagged photographs taken in central and inner London The new tracks Cities are carpeted with pictures, but these pictures are not public art or the work of a subversive street artist. They are the geo-tagged photos continuously being uploaded to sites like Flickr and Twitter. This is creating a new world to explore. A world which could change how we think about the built environment and its heritage....

The Printers won’t kill the Pin Factory To hear some of the talk around 3D printers one could be forgiven for thinking they’ll transform us all into a collection of skilled artisans creating in our bedrooms. Regardless of what one makes of other spectres that have been raised (neighbours running off 3D guns and the undermining of copyright) this seems an undeniably attractive image. Though it probably won’t be quite like that in reality, for a rather old-fashioned reason....

In the 1970s, London’s Docklands area stretched empty and derelict east of the city centre. The wharves that had provided employment for tens of thousands standing deserted for mile upon mile along the Thames. The shift to containers for shipping had made the docks too small and put them out of business. To fill this vacuum came what was then the largest regeneration scheme in Europe. The redevelopment of the docks, heavily underpinned by government tax breaks, was mainly focused on financial services, pre-digital media i....