The Architectural League of New York has chosen BREAKOUT! Escape from the Office as one of the big exhibition pieces for their “Situated Technologies: Toward the Sentient City” in 2009.

NYCwireless is one of the key team members of BREAKOUT!, and Anthony Townsend (one of our co-founders) is chairing the exhibit. The rest of the board (including me!) will be heavily involved in making this exhibition a reality.

Over a two week period, BREAKOUT! will return creative work to the streets of New York. Using co-working as a model, and injecting lightweight versions of essential office infrastructure into urban public spaces, BREAKOUT! will explore new and productive niches for working outside of traditional office buildings. As the 21st century moves towards a knowledge-based economy, conventional office spaces are becoming obsolete; people no longer need to co-locate in order to access shared tools and resources. BREAKOUT! seeks to create a new architecture for the creative city by appropriating public spaces for collaborative knowledge work.

To find out more about why we are doing this, read the FAQ. For more background on the architectural and organizational design  concepts we’re playing with, check our our BREAKOUT! Prezi (thanks to the team at Kitchen Budapest for this awesome Powerpoint killer).

A whole bunch of stuff about our social collaboration tools is in the works and will be posted in a month or so.

We are looking for groups in cities around the world to host local BREAKOUT! festivals and meetups during September 2009. More details will be posted soon.

Key team members:

• Anthony Townsend (Research Director, Technology Horizons Program, Institute for the Future)
• Georgia Borden (Associate Director, DEGW)
• Tony Bacigalupo (co-founder, CooperBricolage)
• Sean Savage (co-founder, PariSoMa)
• Dana Spiegel (Executive Director, NYCwireless)
• Dennis Crowley (founder dodgeball.com)
• Laura Forlano (Kauffman Fellow in Law, Information Society Project, Yale Law School)

BREAKOUT! is being presented as part of the exhibition, “Situated Technologies: Toward the Sentient City,” curated by Mark Shepard and organized the Architectural League of New York.  For more information about the exhibition and related projects, visit www.situatedtechnologies.net.