jetsons again

Described as the most Jetsonian of technological wonders, pneumatic tubes were the topic of the Smithsonian blog recently. Matt Novak described how pneumatic tubes appeared in a particular episode amongst a dazzling array of other futuristic technologies such as videophones, 3D TV, cleaning robots and moving sidewalks. All of these technologies he suggests, are "masquerading as scenery while they're in fact the star of the show".

This episode is titled Miss Solar System, and was aired on February 10th, 1963. It featured a horizontal pneumatic tube system with multiple points of entry and exit, which differed from the vertical systems used in previous episodes.

Image from the Smithsonian blog.

freight tubes of the future

Thanks to Andy for sending me this picture from Retronaut, of the 1920s city of the future, complete with freight tubes:

pneumatic post cartoon of the week 4

The Jetsons

pneumatic post cartoon of the week 3

Futurama

Images from Next Big Future, Pleated Jeans and Geeks.co.uk.

sketches of the future

Do you find yourself drawing on napkins, keeping sketchbooks, pencilling in the margins of your fieldnotes or doodling while on the phone?

If so, this you will be interested in this sketching workshop:

We are seeking people who use sketching—for developing greater understanding, for conveying ideas as they are being formed, for communicating fully formed ideas, or for other reasons—to participate in a workshop to better understand the varied roles of sketching in design, research, and practice. Participants from all fields, with any skill level or experience in sketching, are welcome and encouraged. We are interested in how design methods are being adopted, adapted, and appropriated in various disciplines, using sketching as a concrete example and focal starting point. This workshop will therefore assemble a diverse group of participants to explore the methodological, epistemological, and practical issues, such as the tension between artifact production and knowledge production, that can arise in such work.

The workshop will involve presentations and discussions on the evolution and incorporation of design methods in a variety of disciplines, as well as hands-on sketching activities that will give participants the opportunity to try out a variety of sketching methods. This workshop seeks to document some of the myriad ways in which design methods, including but not limited to sketching, are being combined with approaches from other disciplines. Participants will also be encouraged to engage in a reflective dialogue examining the ramifications of these methodological crossovers and hybrids, both on the individuals involved and on their respective fields.

Potential attendees should submit a sketch and a statement. The sketch should come from their own work, though it need not be a sketch they have made, simply one they use. The sketch can take any form and is not limited to freehand drawings. The statement, up to 2 pages in DIS conference format, should describe the role that sketching plays in their work, using the submitted sketch as an example. Strong statements will reflect on the methodological issues in, and the implications of, using sketching in the author’s own field of work.

Submissions may be sent via email to the organizers (ericpsb and mkh46, both at cornell.edu). Submission Deadline: March 23, 2012Notification: April 6, 2012Workshop Date: June 11, 2012

For more information visit the workshop website.

Which reminds me, next on my reading list is Andrew Pickering's The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, because it has been recommended, because Pickering resides at my university, and because it has a great title!

Image drawn by, and used with kind permission of my dad, John Harris.

the tubes of tomorrow: the future marches on!

How do we imagine and talk about the future? This question and others are raised in a great book I am reading at the moment called Contested Futures, an edited collection of essays about technoscience.

One essay, by Dutch researcher Harro van Lente, examines the different kinds of language involved in voicing the technological future. He writes that often historical instances are used to formulate technical progress as one piece of ongoing evolution, that is inevitable, and must not be stopped.

This essay is very relevant to the work I am doing on genetic research which steams ahead at a remarkable, seemingly unstoppable pace. But I am also interested in how pneumatic tubes are used as a linguistic device to represent the future of technological progress.

This wonderful prune commercial filled with pneumatic-people tubes, wrinke technicians and rockets seems to be a great example of van Lente's argument, that images of history are pulled together to create a narrative of technological achievement.

Thanks to James Veitch @seamusamadan for his link to this video on twitter.

pneumatic tube classic of the week 2

How can you have classics without cartoons and comics? Those who inhabit the 31st century world of Futurama are whizzing around in some of the most popular pneumatic tubes of contemporary cultural production:

Image from Comic Vine

pneumatic tube classic of the week 1

This great bit of footage from Brazil, where a little bit of re-hosing has a magical effect, is the first post in my 'classics' category. The 'pneumatic tube classic of the week', following from the 'pneumatic tube map of the week', will be a post about a classic book, film, cartoon, TV show or other media about pneumatic tube systems.

Please send in any of your favourite pneumatic tube classics to be potentially included on the list!

Video from YouTube.

new hospital news

Due to open this year is Qatar's largest and most modern healthcare facility: Al Wakra Hospital. The hospital will have the latest, "state-of-the-art" technology, and will be the first hospital in Qatar to have a pneumatic tube system. The pneumatic tubes will be installed along with "specially designed ceilings with sceneries of a blue sky and palm trees to create a pleasant atmosphere and give a psychological boost to the patients".

Other hospitals around the world are receiving new pneumatic tube treatment. Along with computer panels installed at the foot of each new bed, an ICU unit in West Virginia has also installed pneumatic tube systems, because "sometimes a couple of minutes makes a difference". New systems are linking clinics in Beloit Memorial Hospital and Beloit Clinic, in Wisconsin, and older systems are being upgraded in Geisinger Medical Centre, in Danville, Virginia. One new hospitals' renovation including a pneumatic tube system, in Gardner, Massachusetts, made one nurse feel as if she was "on an other planet". A little sci-fi futuristic utopia appearing in our hospitals perhaps?

Image from MedGadget.

retro-futures

I am currently working on a project about the future. This new research study in Maastricht is a sociological examination of direct-to-consumer genetic testing. This is a fascinating and emerging field, where individuals can find out about their susceptability for a range of diseases in their future. This is just one aspect of the technology - people can also find out about their ancestory lineage, have matchmaking genetic tests which promise a better sex-life and 'healthy children', or even have their cats and dogs genetically tested.

People want to know about the future for a whole range of reasons, often to reduce the element of unwanted surprise and master the unknown. It may also be that we are curious, and genetic testing is a new technology to be played with. I am reading a great book on this topic at the moment, called Insatiable Curiosity: Innovation in a Fragile Future by Helga Nowotny (recommended by a colleague). Nowonty writes that the shape, the content, the fullness of the future, and the images we construct of it, have significance only in the present. Some of us have a utopian vision of the future, for others it is dystopian.

The retro-futuristic representation of pneumatic tube systems is certainly often cast in a utopian light, although the bureaucratic monotony of the technology also has a dystopian air in works such as 1984 and Brazil. For those who are optomistic, Nowotny writes that “the space of the future is filled with new technological visions and highly promising mini-utopias that hold the potential to make life easier, better, and more beautiful”. This seems a wonderful description of how pneumatic tubes are often considered in hospitals, banks and homes. Pneumatic tubes have made their way into a number of futuristic scenarios, most noteably Futurama's Tube Transport System (for Futurama's best healthcare moments, see this Comedy Central post) and the Jetsons, as well as 1984 and Brazil. Whilst pneumatic tubes are often projected as something of the future, they are not new. The new is unknown, whereas the future, or our vision of it, often says much more about the present and the past.

Retro-futuristic images of pneumatic tubes have many traces of another era of technological advance - the industrial revolution. We can learn about this history, and much more, by looking at how, as society, we consider, represent, use and play with 'technologies of the future'.

Image from Vintage Culture.

homely tubes

Pneumatic tube systems are used in hospitals, supermarkets, banks and pharmacies. But what about our own homes?

A UK-based project called Foodtubes, which promises to revolutionalise food transportation via pneumatic/vacuum technology, has recently led to all sorts of incredulous outcries and postulations by techie and environmental bloggers embracing and ridiculing the idea. Someone who has commented on the grist blog post about this issue argues that it is a waste to use Foodtube technology at the organisational level, but rather it should be taken into our own homes:

"I don't know about replacing deliveries to stores... trucks are awfully efficient for that! Make them electric, and they'd be hard to beat. On the other hand, pneumatic tubes could provide efficient delivery to individual homes, eliminating the need for people to go to the store. With modern barcode or RFID systems, the packages could be routed to the correct house easily enough. Some things might not do too well - I wouldn't want to cram a 20-pound watermelon into a 6-inch tube - but for most staples it would work quite well"

It isn't the first time that pneumatic tube technology has been considered for home usage. Remember that great Heineken ad from a few months ago? There is also the home elevator, as well as centralised home vacuum cleaning units. My dad remembers one of these units being installed in his parents' new home in the 1980s. It seems that home-based pneumatic tube technology is either something from the past, or the projected Jetsonian future, but is it for us right now?

Image courtesy of fabulousfairy.

pneumatic transportation: the stuff of dreams

For centuries, the concept of human transportation via pneumatic tube has captured the imagination of entrepreneurs, novelists, tinkerers and inventors.  I have already posted about the grandest dreamer of them all, Alfred Beach, whose pneumatic subway system was thwarted by politics and personal vendettas. 

Speeding into the future, the world of Futurama is connected via a vast pneumatic tube network.  Whilst Beach’s subway was never realised in its original form, and Futurama’s system is the stuff of science fiction, there are nonetheless a number of ways in which humans can be catapulted through the atmosphere via pneumatics.  There are the nifty elevators for one, and now something which has recently captured my attention, the shweeb.  OK, so the shweeb doesn’t really count as pneumatic transport (and is much more about pedal power), but it certainly resembles a pneumatic capsule.  Google has recently backed the invention, with many asking: why?  Should such inventions remain the stuff of dreams and TV shows?

Beach pneumatic plan from Wikimedia Commons.

the invisible work of pneumatic tubes

When I was in Japan I read 1984 for the first time. It seemed a pretty timely thing to do straight after a science and technology conference. Of course so much of George Orwell's futuristic vision has played out in real-time (one of the papers I mentioned in the last post, about telemonitoring of patients in their own home, springs to mind immediately), whilst other aspects remain in the realm of fantasy and fiction.

An important part of Orwell's 1984-future, at the organisational level, was communication via pneumatic tube.

"With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the telescreen could prevent him from uttering when his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece and put on his spectacles. Then he unrolled and clipped together four small cylinders of paper which had already flopped out of the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk" (p40).

The pneumatic tube was one of three important 'orifices' in Winston's office space - the other two were for newspapers and the waste-disposal slit, or memory hole. It is from the pneumatic tubes where most of Winston's work arrives; the work of rewriting history. One day there is fragment of paper which blatently documents the lies behind this history work, rolled up with the other papers in the tube.

The pneumatic tube system is part of the invisible workings of the Ministry, part of the invisible work of totalitarian control:

"What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms" (p42).

In many ways, pneumatic tubes are still part of the invisible work of organisations, retaining that historic/futuristic feel that Orwell captures incredibly well in 1984. It is this invisible work, the work that happens backstage, that makes pneumatic tubes such an interesting site of analysis and a technology which captures the imagination of writers and the public.