Karoliina of Colossal Order took the stage of the TED Talks to talk about how games can shape our tomorrow. Do you think games can be used to help build our future?
Watch the full TED Talk here
How a video game might help us build better cities - Karoliina Korppoo at TED
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Karoliina of Colossal Order took the stage of the TED Talks to talk about how games can shape our tomorrow. Do you think games can be used to help build our future?
Watch the full TED Talk here
TBH the quality of TED has been declining for some time. It was originally intended for an elite audience, but as it became more public-facing it went downhill.
Eh, used to be Ted was for real & Tedx was for subpar/weirdo stuff. These days tho.
I thought urban planners already have access to CADs and real world data and mathematical models and other things which help building better cities?
Sounds like one of the "making the world a better place" TechCrunch presentations featured in a TV show "Silicon Valley".
Sounds like one of the "making the world a better place" TechCrunch presentations featured in a TV show "Silicon Valley".
Can't say I agree with this. The simulation (not just the traffic simulation) is far too shallow and simple. It would be unwise to use this for any real-life scenarios, including urban planning. I think they are in over their heads with this.
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There some real diamonds in the rough in tedx too.
I agree this one is odd though, she seems to have stage fright or not know the language or something. There's no flow in the talking. I ran it at 2x speed and it still felt very slow.
Also "Let me talk for 1.5 minutes and then show you a few youtube videos" don't exactly feel like it was very planned out.
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TED is becoming a joke nowadays
the amount of actually professional people who do their jobs professionally being featured there has been dropping like a meteorite last few years
instead, we have amateurs and social science people being featured most cause they are the only ones who have time for this sort of thing
the amount of actually professional people who do their jobs professionally being featured there has been dropping like a meteorite last few years
instead, we have amateurs and social science people being featured most cause they are the only ones who have time for this sort of thing
I thought this was a very good video for the target audience. I am in no means an expert on what Ted talks are, but my understanding is that they are meant to spread unknown ideas.
For a lot of people doing research, especially at the top of their field, there tends to be a parochial or elite attitude which can stifle creativity. In my field, international relations, if you are not part of the elite, that is to say most likely at the forefront of theory-making, there are chances nobody will pay much attention (because you are not likely to be published in top tier journals). This tends to hold true for any research and is usually taken for granted if no research has yet been done on the sociology of this particular field. This means that an amateur will probably never be listened to.
What Karoliina is saying, is not that her team has created a revolutionary tool to replace theories and models used in urban planning. What she is saying is that she has created a tool that let's neophytes and amateur urban planners put their ideas to life and most importantly share them. Those concepts might inspire some professional urban planner somewhere to consider a problem from a different angle, thus might become a real city. The fact that a city has already done that shows that some professional urban planner somewhere actually agrees.
Maybe this video will inspire an urban planner who watched the video to get the game, look at the workshop and investigate if there are any concepts he might be inspired from but would never have thought about. It might radically change the way his field thinks about urban planning. It might save 5 minutes of commute a day for millions of people in New York. It might do neither. The worst that will happen is that he will waste a few hours.
I know that if I had access to a similar raw pool of ideas that I would actually take some time to look at it, if nothing else just out of curiosity to see how people who are not in my field look at the problems I spend my career working on.
For a lot of people doing research, especially at the top of their field, there tends to be a parochial or elite attitude which can stifle creativity. In my field, international relations, if you are not part of the elite, that is to say most likely at the forefront of theory-making, there are chances nobody will pay much attention (because you are not likely to be published in top tier journals). This tends to hold true for any research and is usually taken for granted if no research has yet been done on the sociology of this particular field. This means that an amateur will probably never be listened to.
What Karoliina is saying, is not that her team has created a revolutionary tool to replace theories and models used in urban planning. What she is saying is that she has created a tool that let's neophytes and amateur urban planners put their ideas to life and most importantly share them. Those concepts might inspire some professional urban planner somewhere to consider a problem from a different angle, thus might become a real city. The fact that a city has already done that shows that some professional urban planner somewhere actually agrees.
Maybe this video will inspire an urban planner who watched the video to get the game, look at the workshop and investigate if there are any concepts he might be inspired from but would never have thought about. It might radically change the way his field thinks about urban planning. It might save 5 minutes of commute a day for millions of people in New York. It might do neither. The worst that will happen is that he will waste a few hours.
I know that if I had access to a similar raw pool of ideas that I would actually take some time to look at it, if nothing else just out of curiosity to see how people who are not in my field look at the problems I spend my career working on.
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Cities skylines is by far the most accessable, easy to use and cheapest traffic behavior simulator.
It's like SketchUp. You won't use SketchUp for a design in the executional stage. But it is used as a sketch tool.
I think cs simulation power could be greater if start and end nodes of cims could be modeled. Since cities don't live in isolation.
Unfortunately highway and regional planning is mostly based by politicial arguments and NIMBY feelings rather than based on the best solution.
Traffic models are mostly used just to calculate the lifespan and environmental impact of an already proposed solution.
Therefore i think making city planning accessable to the masses will result in a better founded populistic opinion
It's like SketchUp. You won't use SketchUp for a design in the executional stage. But it is used as a sketch tool.
I think cs simulation power could be greater if start and end nodes of cims could be modeled. Since cities don't live in isolation.
Unfortunately highway and regional planning is mostly based by politicial arguments and NIMBY feelings rather than based on the best solution.
Traffic models are mostly used just to calculate the lifespan and environmental impact of an already proposed solution.
Therefore i think making city planning accessable to the masses will result in a better founded populistic opinion
I asked someone at our construction office the question in the OP and now he needs a new desk and a new head. 
I agree, and propose the Seattle area roads and how people behave on them as a prime example. In particular, where I-5 has some crazy lane merging going north from shortly after I-90.
In theory, things should mostly go fine, in practice, too many greedy people racing up from behind on the outside to beat everyone else.
I'd also be curious how much Cities: Skylines simulates people moving farther away from work to where they can "afford" to buy a house, to then spend all their money driving and commuting. But hey, they can afford a house, though they're frittering away all their hours with cars/transit!
We need to get into a better balance of holistic system design for cities and lifestyles.
"Have you séén the stock of nVidia these days 0.o!"
*starts some thread, mumbles the word selflearning, forgets to mention nVidia is selling login data from users on the black market, gets burned on stage, thinks about another DLC*
*starts some thread, mumbles the word selflearning, forgets to mention nVidia is selling login data from users on the black market, gets burned on stage, thinks about another DLC*