BLOCKTOWN is an community design project powered through your comments and ideas. It’s an experimental game of city-making, a digital Madurodam. With each post, a new layer of buildings will be added to the Town. Your photographs, quotes, stories and feedback are the raw materials that drive construction for each new layer.
Exploring Crypto-QR Codes as Plans
For the 2.0 phase of BLOCKTOWN (launching next week!) I've been exploring different patterns that could be used for laying out building footprints and town features. This post outlines a bit of that thinking and why the anatomy of QR codes provides a nice backdrop for town planning to take place.
Pieces of a Puzzle
In recent years, the QR code has found an unexpected home within the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency. The black and white QR has become a default method for sharing account (or “wallet”) addresses. With Bitcoin and others, each square black and white puzzle provides a link to a secure wallet account. The pixelated pattern is easily generated, sharable and customizable. Today, these patterns hop between cryptocurrency holders as a secure way of exchanging funds. Over the last decade, the QR has become a billboard of the visual language that defines Bitcoin and crypto-currency culture.
In a QR code, the black and white squares are composed in an language of puzzle-units that are read by a camera in a very specific order. To make sense of this seemingly random grid, there are 3 orientation points at 3 corners of the code, with 1 alignment point that helps the camera keep track as it navigates the landscape of data. There is a start point, end point and indicators that tell the reader what kind of address it is being forwarded to.
A Fabric for Programming Cities?
This QR pattern-work is a kind of programmable fabric. Maybe even a map? If you look down on it, all of the different hierarchies begin to look a lot like roadways, buildings, skyscrapers and ultimately cities. Steemit provides a unique opportunity to explore the potential here. Comments can be used decide on building types, public spaces and materials.
Looking below, a time-lapse of Playa Del Carmen (in Mexico) shows how urban development spreads along coastal infrastructure. Different features along the coastline drive clusters of growth. With BLOCKTOWN we'll be exploring planning features that can attract, push away and challenge.
- Timelapse is a project by Google Earth and Carnegie Mellon University CREATE Lab's Time Machine Library. Using the data mined from 5 separate satellites orbiting the Earth, this mapping project compiled 3.95 terapixel global images into over 25,000,000 overlapping multi-resolution video tiles.