Google Releases Sketchup

[via B2B Blog]

Google recently released a free 3D digital modeling tool called "Sketchup".  This was software that Google obtained by acquiring @Last Software.

Sketchup allows people to create 3D models, and then place them in the Google Earth environment via a free plugin.  (The software download is only available for Windows at this time).

This brings back to mind something that I had written about almost a year ago, on the Smartmobs weblog. The posting I had written back then was about Detroit Professor Jeff Rice's CTheory article on "21st Century Graffiti".

Here's what I wrote back then:

Ctheory.net hosts a paper by Jeff Rice that discusses how Detroit and some of it's institutions are attempting to re-invent Detroit as a digital city. Detroit's plan has been to lure technology companies to the decaying downtown of Detroit. It is theorized that these technology companies will then help attract and maintain a "Creative Class" who will spearhead urban/economic renewal.

Rice proposes a wholly different direction. He proposes that the city itself should become "digitized" by utilizing social software, and creating an emergent folksonomy of encounter and experience throughout the whole city. Quote from Cthoery

My argument is that the connections Florida stresses are not found in a causal or referential relationship among individuals, capital, the city or other forces, but rather in the new media logic of assemblage; that is, combination in general. In the assemblage, reference is not a requirement. The social connectivity planners like Florida believe will emerge out of urban renewal may be better actualized through the digital assemblage of tagging. My call is for a plan of information tagging, where residents, working in digital spaces, reimagine the city through their own conceptualization and actualization of tags. In place of tagging the bypass or the stop sign with graffiti, they tag the city itself as an encountered name or moment within a digital, interconnected space. On the Web, these encounters become moments of discursive interaction and combination as others add to the tags with their own tagging attributes. "The history of urbanism," Steven Johnson notes, "is also the story of more muted signs, built by the collective behavior of smaller groups and rarely detected by outsiders." Tagging brings this behavior to the foreground so that social connectivity is generated among those within the recognized urban space and those often deemed "outsiders" (those who bring new naming conventions to the discussion and to the urban space itself). If there, in fact, exists a Digital Detroit as this city claims for itself, than it must be found within the practice of tagging.

Detroit, like the urban experience in general, has become non-referential. Its empty spaces, or "ruins" as the Fabulous Ruins of Detroit website declares, don't refer to anything anymore. Tagging allows us to transform that non-referentiality into social experience. The lesson of Detroit is a lesson for all urban sites. Digital space becomes social space through assembled meanings, and that assemblage actualizes the popular logic of social software. Tagging, then, marks a place where new media logic informs our understanding of space and the urban, fashioning a sense of the "social" not yet accounted for in urban studies. Imagine, then, the city as a network of tags. Residents, who tag themselves simultaneously as writers or non-writers, mark the city through memory maps, weblogs, del.icio.us tags, and other related tools in order to reconstruct the city's sense of urbanity as a digital experience. The tagging generates a number of assembled taxonomies, some recognizable, many not. Through the assemblages, we find new Detroits to engage. We find new Detroits emerging out of our own discursive constructions. This reworking is social in ways capital investment has failed to generate. By making these cities cyber -- that is, by putting them on the Web -- the tags used to develop these spaces will inevitably be linked to other similarly named tags for other cities, for other, not yet imagined, encounters.

 

 

Jeff Rice's ideas show one possible social software application for low or no cost access to 3D modeling software and Geographic Information Systems virtual representations like Google Earth (or virtual worlds like Second Life).

I am personally interested in the possibilities of open design concepts springing up around these new ways of creating.