What are we if not complex, unknowable pattern recognisers?

Our brains do two things exceedingly well – they search out new patterns, almost craving  them, and they fall into old ones, settling on a comfortable routine.  Simultaneously, dichotomously, we seek the new and the familiar.

This essential part of us leads us into a world where our behaviour is dominated by patterns too. Huge, complex, fractal, unknowable patterns that we feel we can understand, but which slide easily over our understanding before we can grasp us.

We hope to change that.

Our role as the Locative Urbanist guild is to gather and analyse the data of the city and its inhabitants and to use that to rezone space in optimal configurations.  We have terabytes of storage at our disposal and advanced custom AI and pattern recognition software.  More than enough to remove the temporal nature of observation as being its defining element, and more than enough to divine, comfortably and confidently, future directions of the city.

Working with the other guilds – the Crossmedia Ecologist and the Master Codemaker – we will observe and record and ultimately share.  We aren’t hoarders.  Data without use is just magentic fields bound on a metal platter or atoms caught in an uncertain spin-state.  What we learn will be given to the city, enabling people to make smarter decisions on their behaviour, to modify their patterns, to help rezone the city into something brilliant and new.

We look forward to working with you all to process and harness the flip-switch patterns of the city.

Note: and in the absence of our own systems being in a state where we can visualise our local data, here are examples from other researchers that will illustrate the work we are embarking on – [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnpGIgzNBJo]