As computing moves from the personal desktop into the world around us, the problems of design and usability go beyond technical considerations to contend with preexisting social structure and cultural norms associated with public spaces.
While much computing research has been concerned with home or work, the focus has recently been shifting toward “third places”—the spaces between home and work. These are complex spaces, as they are navigated both through physical movement and interpretations of social context.2 As computing blunders into our personal worlds—annoying, interrupting, or distracting us—it is potentially even more disruptive in public spaces, where friends and strangers alike navigate the complex social context of coexistence. While public space presents challenges to technology design, it also has the advantage of being more accessible than private spaces such as home or work, affording great potential for both observational studies and field testing of real world applications. Sociological research illustrates that public spaces can be understood as combinations of “front spaces” for performative action5 and spaces for semiprivate and private interactions. People inhabit these spaces even as they interpret their surroundings and gauge the mood of these spaces to increase their understanding of where they live. As much as public space brings with it a sense of egalitarianism where civic life is played out and embraced,7 it also can be fraught with adversity and conflict. Both these contingencies must be taken into account when considering the design of computing for public spaces. This special issue focuses on the topic of urban computing because we feel it is important to consider public spaces as potential sites for the development of computing. The articles presented here point to issues of theoretical understanding of these spaces, as well as the technical feasibility of technology design and development. We are not calling for technology designers to become urban planners and social scientists, but we do suggest that there is a wealth of research in these areas that needs to be taken into account when designing new technologies. Collaborations are crucial to understanding social life and creating technologies that can augment it in positive ways. We believe that research in urban computing can be useful for augmenting and extending existing theories in relevant fields and for greater blending of these fields into a coherent understanding of public social life. The articles presented here were selected based not only on their ability to shed light on the field, but also for their collective impact—each offering a different perspective on public computing.
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