Projects Archives | Alex Taylor

Video: Ecological Reparation & Blockchain Food Imaginaries

Alex Taylor — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 13:08:25 +0000

Under what technoscientific conditions might the scarcity of food be understood as contingent on heterogeneous actors? And how might the possibilities of food abundance be approached as a reparative project of valuing their manifold relations? Blockchain promises to be an infrastructure that presents both productive imaginaries and also challenges to such restorative and sustainable work (Seidler et al 2017; Rozas et al, 2018).

In a series of workshops, we critically experimented with these possibilities and challenges. Working with diverse participants including community growers, organisers, artists, and technologists we used a variety of playful methods to act out fictional scenarios set in 2025, when all of London had been transformed into a city farm. For organisations and participants, reparation meant working in the aftermath of social and environmental collapse to bring into being more-than-human-value systems that radically decentred human knowledge and experience.

Checkout our new video w @ecobruja @CIMethods @WarwickEHN & D Papadopoulos @NottmSTS in conversation w @Lara_Houston @CreaturesEu @saralara_heit @alxndrt @CityUniLondon @cityuni_hcid on @spitz_cityfarm #blockchain #Food #foodimaginaries #urbanfoodcommons https://t.co/KJQ0uZMVEt

— Ecological Reparation (@EcoReparation) October 27, 2021

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Securing a bicycle saddle to a bike

Alex Taylor — Fri, 11 Dec 2015 22:25:57 +0000

Slightly off topic, but I thought it would be worth sharing my attempt at what might seam the trifling problem of securing a bike seat or saddle to a bike.

As many cyclists will know, seats or saddles can be a real target for thieves — I’ve had at least two stolen. The trouble is good saddles can get a reasonable price on the black market. If you’re in London, just pop down to Brick Lane on a Sunday and you’ll find the coveted and pricey Brooks saddles being flogged for 10s of £s.
To save myself the cost — not to say the uncomfortable ride home, saddle-less — I’ve been looking into ways to better secure my saddle. The crude option is to use some way of locking the saddle to the frame, like a small lock or part of a bike chain (see here for ideas). At the more expensive end there are dedicated bolts/nuts you can buy with personalised ‘keys’, such as the Saddle Lock from Atomic22 (~£29) and options from PitLock (although it’s not clear they have something to bolt the seat to the seat post). These look good, but they’re quite expensive and I’ve found if difficult to tell which options will fit my bike’s seat-post and saddle.
A solution I’ve come up with is to use a combination of a generic security bolt and nut. I’ve found both on an online shop called Security Safety Products.

Locking the seat to the seat post

First I chose a security bolt to replace the one that attaches my saddle to the seat post. To do that I measured the gauge (width) and length of the current bolt and then bought the corresponding security bolt and appropriate security screw.

I went for the M8 (8mm thread width) by 50mm long “Pin Hex Button head Mach.Screw” (M8x50mm), and the H50 security screw (the website tells you which screw you need).

What you get are 10 bolts (minimum order) and a small screw driver insert with a special fitting. The latter as the website explains “”
All I had to do is replace the original bolt that secures your saddle to the seat post, with the new security bolt.

Locking the seat and seat post to the bike frame

To secure the seat post to the bike I found a M8 security nut that fit the existing seat-post bolt, again on the Security Safety Products site. You can see from the picture on the left that the original nut was a standard well-used bolt.
Also, you need to buy the specific drive socket that fits the security nut — for me, this was a “Removable Security Nut 1/2 drive socket KM8R”. Not sure why, but this is pretty expensive at £17.99, so it may be worth looking for other options here.
The fitting is pretty straightforward. Use a standard spanner to unscrew the original nut and then the drive socket (attached to a socket ratchet or wrench) to screw on the new bolt.

A few general comments

The downside with this solution is you can only buy a minimum of 10 bolts and 10 nuts, but at £14.22 and £7.90 per pack (respectively), it’s not too painful. Don’t forget to factor in the cost of the security screw and drive socket though which in my case was £3.58 and £17.99. Also, although Security Safety Products provide a good service, their postal charges are quite steep.
Of course, nothing is failsafe, and this idea is vulnerable to thieves having the right fittings — I don’t think that’s likely, though, not until they read this post anyway.
Naturally, this idea won’t work with all seat and seat post fittings. It could work with different arrangements though, just make sure to get the right gauged nuts and bolts and that you’ve got enough room to tighten them with a screw diver or spanner.
If you’ve read this far and you think you need a M8 bolt or nut (and live close to East London) drop me a line. I’ll probably have spares of both.

Screw driver with replaceable fitting.
This kind of thing.

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Published Data and life on the street

Alex Taylor — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 10:59:05 +0000

We’ve published a short commentary on the Tenison Road project in the new Big Data & Society journal. Download it here (open access).

Taylor, A. S., Lindley, S., Regan, T., & Sweeney, D. (2014). Data and life on the street. Big Data & Society, 1(2).

Abstract: What does the abundance of data and proliferation of data-making methods mean for the ordinary person, the person on the street? And, what could they come to mean? In this paper, we present an overview of a year-long project to examine just such questions and complicate, in some ways, what it is to ask them. The project is a collective exercise in which we – a mixture of social scientists, designers and makers – and those living and working on one street in Cambridge (UK), Tenison Road, are working to think through how data might be materialised and come to matter. The project aims to better understand the specificities and contingencies that arise when data is produced and used in place. Mid-way through the project, we use this commentary to give some background to the work and detail one or two of the troubles we have encountered in putting locally relevant data to work. We also touch on a methodological standpoint we are working our way into and through, one that we hope complicates the separations between subject and object in data-making and opens up possibilities for a generative refiguring of the manifold relations.

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Talk at “Austerity Futures?”

Alex Taylor — Thu, 31 Oct 2013 20:18:59 +0000

Abstract for upcoming talk at Austerity Futures? seminar 4.
[Big] data futures, from the street.
Stories about big data are everywhere. We’re being told how significant the impact of big data will be on our lives by all kinds of people in the know. And yet I’ve been grappling with what (big) data might really mean to people who aren’t fully signed up members of the digerati, those shapers, makers and moders of technological futures. I’ve pondered, in short, on two simple questions: how does data matter to ‘people on the street’, and how might they want it to matter. In this talk, I’ll reflect on a project we’ve been building up at Microsoft Research to begin working through these questions. I want to discuss our efforts to ground a technological imaginary in ordinary life or, to put it another way, to enable a productive re-imagining of ‘big data futures’—to coin a phrase—from ‘the street’. I’ll describe how we’ve taken this challenge quite literally. Just over three weeks ago we began working with one street in Cambridge, Tenison Road. For at least a year, we plan to think through what data means for the Tenison Road community and in some cases to enable ways for the community to intervene in the future imaginaries. Although this won’t be a talk or for that matter a project about austerity, I certainly think it is one in which austerity and its repercussions will come to matter. My aim, then, will be to reflect on how this is a project concerned with futures, futures that are heavily concentrated in the minds of the technological elite, but also some that are more pedestrian that might just offer alternative possibilities for what (big) data could mean and what we might do with it.
web: tenisonroad.com | email: research@tenisonroad.com | twitter: @tenisonroad

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Short note on Solove’s ‘Nothing to Hide’

Alex Taylor — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 12:24:00 +0000

Some early thoughts on data and privacy, thinking with Solove’s Nothing to Hide:
Early on in his 2011 book, Nothing to Hide, Daniel Solove makes a provocative claim. He writes:
“Legal and policy solutions focus too much on the problems under the Orwellian metaphor—those of surveillance—and aren’t adequately addressing the Kafkaesque problems—those of information processing” p.26
Solove’s point here is that much of the legal wranglings and policy making surrounding privacy are based on the premise that people have something to hide. Thus the aims have, by and large, been tied to securing protections against surveillance—operating within the rubric of an “Orwellian metaphor”.
The broader argument Solove makes is that this treatment of privacy is missing the proverbial trick. As a concept, privacy doesn’t simply entail people wanting to hide things. For starters, according to Solove, “[m]any people don’t care about concealing the hotels they stay at, the cars they own, or the kind of beverages they drink.” p.25 “[M]uch of the data gathered in computer databases isn’t particularly sensitive, such as one’s race, birth date, gender, address, or marital status.” P.25
It isn’t so much the gathering of information that matters, Solove contends. It’s what agencies like governments are doing with it—the “information processing”—that counts. The allusion is to a Kafkaesque world in which the relations between agencies and individuals are managed and controlled through the analysis of information or data. The power, so to speak, is held by those who can both access the data and subject it to sophisticated analysis. I take this use of information processing to be analogous to big data analytics and certainly most of the examples Solve refers to support this.
I don’t know what Solove’s sources are for suggesting “most people” don’t care about the content of the information being gathered about them (this recent Guardian article appears to confirm this). I do get his broader point though. Certainly, it’s limiting to see privacy as exclusively based on the premise that people have something to hide. Moreover, the possibilities big data analytics open up for discovering some pretty personal things about people do seem daunting, if perhaps over-hyped.
Yet, without wanting to discount Solove’s argument, I want to propose a different way of thinking about this issue of information processing. Seen from the ground up, we might also start to ask what people themselves want to say through their data and using analytics. When Solove writes about “most people” I think we need to begin thinking about what this actual means and if there are ways of making claims like this actionable. So, a counter to the “nothing to hide argument” could be that most people—given the knowledge and tools—have “something to say”. That is they may want to have some say over how their information is distributed, aggregated, analysed and interpreted and, ultimately, how it is productively put to work. This certainly won’t solve the multiple problems surrounding privacy, but it may at least redistribute the power and, in the process, give people some new ways of expressing themselves.
Oh, and as it happens, this question of how to enable people to have some sort of say and control over what gets done with their information is one of the motivations for the new project we’re ramping up in my group at Microsoft Research.
* A thank you to Jessa Lingel for pointing me to the first quote above from Solove.

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Announcing Tenison Road launch

Alex Taylor — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 09:11:51 +0000

Finally posted some flyers to announce the launch of the big data project we’ll run for a year. We hope to work with the residents and proprietors on Tenison Road in Cambridge to better understand how big data matters and what people on the street want it to be. This is a project that is aiming to get at the interminglings of data and locality, and to intervene in the entanglements in productive ways. That’s the hope! … Fingers crossed.

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