URBAN COMPUTING AND LOCATIVE MEDIA

Anne Galloway, of Purse Lip Square Jaw, has published her PhD.

“The dissertation builds on available sociological approaches to understanding everyday life in the networked city to show that emergent technologies reshape our experiences of spatiality, temporality and embodiment. It contributes to methodological innovation through the use of data bricolage and research blogging, which are presented through experimental and recombinant textual strategies; and it contributes to the field of science and technology studies by bringing together actor-network theory with the sociology of expectations in order to empirically evaluate an area of cutting-edge design.”

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Bio Mapping / Emotion Mapping

by Christian Nold

2004 - ongoing

Bio Mapping is revolutionary methodology and tool for visualising people's reactions to the external world.

Over the last five years, over 2000 people have taken part in community mapping projects in over 25 cities across the globe. In structured workshops, participants re-explore their local area with the use of a unique device invented by Christian Nold which records the wearer's Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. On their return, a map is created which visualises points of high and low arousal.

The unique methodology of this project involves working with groups of people to interpret and analyse the data and adding annotating onto these individual emotion tracks. Through this process communal Emotion Maps of lots of people's emotion data are constructed which are packed full of personal observations and highlight the issues that people feel strongly about.

Over the last years Christian Nold has used this unique methodology and tool in many diverse contexts from art, community development, science research, architectural planning and large scale political consultations. Please get in touch if you would like to set a similar project in your area.

When we become aware of our own and each others unique body reactions to the environment we can create a better world!

Read Emotional Cartography edited by Christian Nold - free PDF download

Some examples:

Stockport Emotion Map

East Paris Emotion Map

San Francisco Emotion Map

Greenwich Emotion Map

Brentford Biopsy

Swords > Ploughshares > Swords

Unfortunately, in recent years there have been so many people, companies and institutions who have tried to copy or imitate the Bio Mapping device and use it for banal, exploitative or anti-social purposes.

For this reason I would like to make it clear that the Bio Mapping device and Emotion Mapping concept are Copyrighted and Trademarked!

For other work and more information please look at:

www.softhook.com

christian at softhook dot com

Cityware - Urban Design and Pervasive Systems

The goal of Cityware is to develop theory, principles, tools and techniques for the design, implementation and evaluation of city-scale pervasive systems as integral facets of the urban landscape. While architecture has shaped the built environment to satisfy urban dwellers aesthetically and to accommodate their functional needs such as face-to-face interactions and travel, pervasive systems shape electronically mediated interactions in urban space, including use of both fixed and mobile displays and wireless communication. A major issue is space and its relationship with behaviour: how do we design the space created by fusing electronically created interaction space with architecturally created physical space? Another major issue is infrastructure: how do we provide interaction and interoperability that scales up to city-scale pervasive systems, while ensuring that they function appropriately and merge aesthetically with urban spaces, materials, forms and uses? 

Cityware is a multidisciplinary research project, integrating the disciplines of architecture and urban design, human-computer interaction and distributed systems. Cityware is funded through the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s WINES programme, with support from the Cityware industrial partners. Cityware began in October 2005 and runs until March 2009.

LINK

Urban Interaction Design

Link

As a reaction to an increasingly information saturated environment, approaching the critisism and reaction 'real-world' physical design with the same language and criteria that we use describe 'virtual' media could help provide insights into both. The urban information space is, like all other media, mostly controlled by capitalism (advertisng or websites) and government (highway signage and government websites).

As the public becomes the user of these spaces, graphiti and flyposting can be seen as no different from leaving a comment on a blog or guestbook or partaking in a wiki. Some forms of hacking equate to media activism, and represent a revolutionary spirit, or even the transformation of pseudo-public space away from a meer information-market, into something approaching art (whilst others are little more than incoherent srawlings).

Urban Digital Media

Link

Stephen Graham - Sentient Cities

Stephen Graham - Sentient Cities

View more presentations from mobilecity2008.

Urban Sensing

personalized estimates of environmental exposure and impact    PEIR, the Personal Environmental Impact Report, is a new kind of online tool that allows you to use your mobile phone to explore and share how you impact the environment and how the environment impacts you. What's unique about PEIR? Taking a step ...

Urban sensing website

Urban Probes-Interventions in Urban Life

Recall that a probe is an instrument that allows measurement of an unknown – returning hopefully useful or interesting data. While probes can fail, their use is often used early on in fields where broad and rapid data is desired. Technology is emerging in urban landscapes where our complex social roles in urban communities, our movement and traces through cities, and our interactions with place and public artifacts intersect. We argue that these conditions are ideal for probes.

An Urban Probe is a fail-fast approach for asking early questions about urban computing in order to focus and influence future urban research and application choices. It is also a useful methodology for conducting rapid urban application discovery and evaluation metrics.

Urban Probes employ a series of lightweight provocative urban proto-tasks to inspire direct discussion from people about their current and emerging public urban landscape. These tasks involve physical construction of simple, functional artifacts and accouterments that are introduced into the urban landscape. These are not paper prototypes, but working models of potential systems. Contrary to traditional methodologies surrounding large scale research projects, each Urban Probe is designed to bypass many classical design approaches – opting instead for rapid, nimble, often intentional encroachments on urban places rather than following a series of typical design iteration cycles.

Urban Probes must capture provocative elements of urban computing questions while incorporating opportunities for play, Happenings, and various Situationists themes such as détournement (rerouting of events and images), and dérive (the urban flow of acts and encounters). Similarly, Urban Probes exploit methods of deep observation coupled with experimentation and concrete interventions in urbanism. In practice, Urban Probes develop and deploy novel physical artifacts into everyday urban settings.

Urban Probes draw large inspiration from the work of several leading researchers in developing technology probes and domestic probes. Such probes combine the social science goal of collecting information about the use and the users of the technology in a real world setting, the engineering goal of field-testing the technology, and the design goal of inspiring users and designers to imagine new kinds of technology to support their needs and desires.

Urban Probes complements these bodies of work by addressing similar themes with respect to urban life. As technology moves from office to home to street, we want to avoid bringing along with it “workplace” values such as efficiency and productivity at the expense of other possibilities. Urban Probes provide methods that aid researchers in gathering fragmentary glimpses into the rich texture of people’s daily urban street life.

Link

Citizen Science

In this research we highlight an important new shift in mobile phone usage – from communication tool to "networked mobile personal measurement instrument". We explore how these new “personal measurement instruments” enable an entirely novel and empowering genre of mobile computing usage called citizen science.  Through the use of sensors paired with personal mobile phones, everyday people are invited to participate in collecting and sharing measurements of their everyday environment that matter to them.

Our research hypothesis is that this new usage model for mobile phones will:

1. improve the science literacy of everyday citizens through active participation in basic scientific principles
2. provide professional scientists with access to richer, finer-grain data sets for modeling and analysis
3. create new experiences and usage models for the mobile phone as a tool for grassroots participation in government and policy making
4. by choice of sensors and software create a deeper and more informed understanding and concern for our climate and environment - hopefully effecting positive societal change

Mobile phones are rapidly becoming the computer platform of choice in developed and developing nations.  These mobile phones already shape our culture – collapsing space and time by enabling us to reach out to contact others at a distance, to perform just-in-time coordination of events, and to purchase, play, and game “on-the-go”.  While there is a growing research space around sensor based activity inferencing and a wealth of existing location applications in the market, we claim that our mobile phones still fall short in their ability to enable us to measure and understand the real world around us.

To read more about this project

Site Visit by Situated Visualization

abstract

We propose a critical review of existing tools and practices typically used to execute the proverbial site visit, followed by focused invention and development of new tools and practices. We argue that conventional methods to study, document and interact with a site are ill suited to capturing seen and unseen aspects that may remain hidden without enhanced aids to observation and visualization. By extension, these methods fundamentally distort the character and context of the design locus, and constrict the role that visualization can have for the duration of the design process.

Thrust by advancements in geo-spatial analysis, simulation modeling and mobile computing, our team of researchers and practitioners will collectively explore and test new practices for site visit, by developing situated visualizations — dynamic visual representations that are spatially relevant to the place in which they are displayed. The team’s transdisciplinary collaboration — from the fields of architecture, urban design, geography, planning, ethnography, industrial design and computer science — will be hands on, gaining insight into the notion of site and extending the role of visualization beyond initial documentation or final presentation in the design process.

Our research activities will focus on a 17-acre industrial district of New York City known as Manhattanville, in which rezoning efforts are raising disputes over land use, economic development, socio-cultural diversity and environmental stewardship. This area has also been declared the “site” for Columbia University’s campus expansion, for which preliminary design propositions have been publicized using various visualization strategies.

Experiments by members of our team have been conducted on this site using augmented reality (AR) techniques and Census datasets in order to generate situated visualizations about Manhattanville’s population. This past spring, these new practices were further explored in a workshop co-taught by architectural and computer science faculty.

Phase One of our proposed research will review and evaluate typical practices used for site visits and site analysis. Phase Two will illustrate the potential of new methods and technologies for collecting, curating and creating information as tools for site visualization. Phase Three will include developing and testing these methods against Manhattanville’s complex landscape. Phase Four will prepare a comprehensive account of innovative visualization tools for site visit and site analysis as important facilitators of the design process.

Team: Petia Morozov, Sean White, and Sarah Williams, all of whom have practices in our respective fields, and all of whom have an affiliation with Columbia University.

Project Wiki

Million Story Building

Location-specific ambient storytelling

If a building could talk, what would it say? How would it “feel” about the comings and goings of the people who use it every day? Would it be affected by their moods and desires? What kind of relationship would it have with its occupants if it could communicate with them somehow, and how would they respond? Perhaps most importantly, would such a feeling-and-talking building even be desirable?

In attempting to answer these whimsical questions, the Mobile and Environmental Media Lab (MEML) at the University of Southern California conceived of Million Story Building, an experimental design project exploring how location-specific mobile technology can add playful, imaginative and practical new layers to the relationship between a structure and its inhabitants.

Using the newly-constructed School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) Building as a test bed, the MEML team has designed a location-sensitive iPhone application (see video) that enables students and faculty to engage with their workplace in a variety of exciting new ways, from scanning Quick Response (QR) code glyphs mounted next to posters in the hallways in order to access and tag video clips from a central database, to leaving virtual messages for others to read in an Augmented Reality view of the building’s central courtyard.

Functions such as these, working together with networks of sensors, interactive plasma screens and web-based social media profiles, made it possible for iPhone-carrying building occupants to learn about SCA history, discover events and activities, share stories and updates of their own, enrich the school’s media archive, and participate in an Alternate Reality Game.

Furthermore, and crucially, users could come to expect increasingly customized communications, behaviors and interaction opportunities as a profile concerning their preferences, habits and interests was generated based on their usage of the system. The end result was a prototype for a personalized and self-renewing “ambient story” experience co-constructed by the collaboration between the occupants of a building and the building itself.

Background

At its heart, Million Story Building is an effort to mobilize a range of storytelling and interaction tactics such that the occupants of the SCA building can experience a deeper and richer connection with their workspace and co-workers. Such an effort is not unique in the history of design; indeed, the practice of embedding story and play in physical space is almost as old as civilization itself – one recalls the Catholic Via dolorosa (Stations of the Cross), the Shingon Buddhist pilgrimage of Shikoku or the transit to the Temple of the Sun at Teotihuacan.

More recently, what Jill Walker-Renberg calls “distributed narratives” have manifested themselves in public and institutional space through sticker art, coordinated graffiti campaigns, flash mobs and other interventions. Million Story Building emerges at the nexus of these practices and the new potentialities unleashed by the recent blossoming of mobile and ubiquitous computational technologies.

More Information

The Million Story Building series archive is an effort to gather together, enframe and contextualize key planning documents from the first phase of the project’s development. By browsing proposals, demo descriptions, annotated meeting notes and other development documents, readers can get a sense of the key concerns from which the project arose and the various components of the prototype application, both implemented and imagined.

Project Link

Challenging The Internet Of The Future With Urban Computing at OneSpace - FIS2008

Challenging The Internet Of The Future With Urban Computing at OneSpace - FIS2008

View more presentations from Emanuele Della Valle.

Public Space As A Catalyst For Change

Public Space As A Catalyst For Change

View more documents from amandake.

Helle Juul, creative director, Ph.D & Kristine Samson, Industrial Ph.D.

Performative Aesthetics in Urban Space JUULFROST Architects

Public Space as a Catalyst for Change covers how can be approached as a catalyst for the development of 'the good city', both architecturally, socially and culturally. The project includes both theoretical studies and practice-oriented methods.

Objective

An interdisciplinary dialogue between architects, geographers, sociologists, ethnologists and planners is a prerequisite for an innovate development of public spaces and cities.

The project’s research and analysis will be founded in seminars where cross-disciplinary scholars and practitioners offer their specific views and knowledge.

Discription

A 3.5 million DKK grant from Realdania launches “Public Spaces as a Catalyst for Change” – a research project that seeks to qualify the practical and theoretical work regarding the development of the Danish city spaces. The project will run until the spring of 2009 and is lead by Helle Juul, PhD., Architect MAA, with John Pløger, Associate Professor at Roskilde University, as academic partner. The blossoming of the experience economy and the knowledge society has established new premises for city development. All over the Denmark ideas about creativity, diversity and “the sparkling life” sets the agenda in the effort to draw citizens, labour and attention to the cities. This cultural and experience orientated strategy raises the risk for a development where each city’s unique characteristic vanishes. The similarity between the strategies that the municipalities use makes it hard to distinguish one city from another. “Public Spaces as a Catalyst for Change” covers how public space as a strategy for the development and transformation of cities can be approached as a catalyst for the development of “the good city” – architecturally, socially and culturally. The project focuses on both theoretic studies and practical tools and addresses municipalities, researchers and students working in the field of city development. “Public Spaces as a Catalyst for Change” focuses on the development of new types of urban public spaces and city life as it takes place in new urban contexts. Using a cross-disciplinary approach, the purpose of the project is to carry out empirical and theoretical analyses of the qualities of the city communities and spaces. The overall aim of the project is to create new knowledge to be used in Danish city planning and education within the field of city spaces.

Elderly People and the City- An Investigation with GPS Methodology

Elderly People and the City- An Investigation with GPS Methodology by Noam Shoval

View more documents from amandake.

Designing for Place-Based Social Interaction of Urban Residents in Mexico, South Africa and Australia

PDF Paper download

Abstract

The design of technology to facilitate social interaction of urban residents is increasingly important for many countries around the world. México and South Africa are particularly prone to issues that stem from urban densification and a lack of adequate affordable housing. Governments look to ICT to take on a mediating and facilitating role. This paper reports on research-in-progress of a tri-continental study. The external factors and aims of this pilot project identifying local case studies to prepare for a larger and longer term international comparison of local community networking approaches are examined. It is argued that by careful attention to cultural and social assets in the community, innovations will be engendered which enhance economic and social development. Preliminary design implications for the support of neighbourhood interactions across different socio-cultural contexts are presented.

City Tag-location-based multiplayer game for spontaneous social interaction

iPaq screens showing 3 different game states

CitiTag is a wireless location-based multiplayer game, designed to enhance spontaneous social interaction and novel experiences in city environments by integrating virtual presence with physical. In the first version of CitiTag you roam the city with a GPS- and WiFi-enabled iPaq PocketPC in search for players of the opposite team that you can ‘tag’. You can also get tagged yourself if one of them gets close to you. Then you need to find a friend to free you. Urban space becomes a playground and everyone is a suspect.

Where: The Open University Campus in Milton Keynes and Bristol Centre (St. Augustine’s Parade

Why:The CitiTag game is being developed to explore social experiences and emergent behaviours in public spaces through playful interaction, based on the awareness of other players’ presence. The project is motivated by the hypothesis that very simple game rules based on presence states (e.g. I am Green and ‘tagged’) can result in an enjoyable social experience, stimulated by real world interaction among players. The aim of our studies is to identify the design implications for future technology mediated social experiences and how such experiments can inform the experience design process.

The project involves the collaboration between HP Labs and the Open University’sKnowledge Media Institute (KMi). KMi’s Centre for New Media is developing the client software and multi-user server. The user trials will provide data for Yanna Vogiazou’s (OU) and Bas Raijmaker’s (RCA) PhD work.

Urban Computing As Fried Eggs

Via Fabien on the 7.5th Floor, I came across an illustration by Karen Martin starting to map the field of Urban Computing. It’s not a field, of course — closer to a large set of intersecting practices and broader disciplines swirling about those practices. Two things to be said. First about visualizations and illustrations of complex social-practice-fields. Second about urban computing (whatever that is, and whyever that is.)

What I find most compelling here is the absence — difficult to capture, to be sure — of the messiness that is definitely part of what is referred to as “urban computing”, which I wouldn’t even try to define, except in a rather messy diagram, much messier than Karen’s valiant work.

Knots, intersections, tangles and generally messy illustrations are, I’m sure, very unpopular, particularly with design’s general fetish of clean lines and the Tufte aesthetic of making complex visualizations all tidy and Tufte.

I’m not an illustrator or visualization guy by any stretch, but I’m much more agreeable, and prone to appreciate the messy illustration of what are complex engagements of social practices. This was my one effort to represent the military-industrial light and magic complex — the swirl of history, time, politics, national security and the entertainment enterprise. No attempt to be orderly and legible in the Tufte sense of things. It’s a complex “eco-system” with layers and knots and disorderly eddies (not flows..please..) of power and aspiration and money. Why organize that with bullets and linear connections? Simplifications erase the beast, leaving just shards of bone to be imaginarily cobbled back into a fictitious whole. What produces meaning, in my mind, is not so much names of practices, or companies or individual participants, but rather the ways in which the imbroglios form, power is manipulated and deployed — the process of deploying “resources” to create the names and to give them “stickiness” and the holding power that then makes them, you know — a “given.”

Latour sums this notion up eloquently, and there’s lots more to be said, at some other time, I’m sure.

“..we do not find all explanations in terms of inscription equally convincing,
but only those that help us to understand how the mobilization and mustering of new
resources is achieved. We do not find all explanations in terms of social groups, interests or economic trends, equally convincing but only those !that offer a specific mechanism to sum up “groups”, “interests”, “money”!and “trends”: mechanisms which, we believe, depend upon the manipulation of paper, print, images and so on.” ["Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together"].

Link

Hybrid Reality and Location-Based Gaming: Redefining Mobility and Game Spaces in Urban Environments

Adriana de Souza e Silva

North Carolina State University, USA, souzaesilva@ncsu.edu

Hybrid reality games and location-based mobile games use urban spaces as the game scenario and are played with the aid of mobile technologies equipped with location awareness and Internet connection. This article conceptualizes hybrid reality and location-based mobile games within the area of game studies via their three main characteristics: mobility, sociability, and spatiality. In addition, the article proposes a theoretical framework for studying these games focusing on the possible implications of transforming urban spaces in playful environments. Last, one location-based mobile game, BOTFIGHTERS, and one hybrid reality game, CAN YOU SEE ME NOW? are used as examples of how these games (a) create a new logic of game space, (b) transform the relationship between serious life and playful spaces, and (c) transform the perception of urban spaces and patterns of mobility through the city.

Key Words: hybrid reality games • location awareness • location-based mobile games • mobile technologies • mobility • urban spaces 

Paper is on acm

Using Virtual Reality to Foster Civic Engagement

Using virtual worlds to foster civic engagement in Boston will be the topic of the April 4

 meeting of the Civic Engagement Research Group (CERG) when it convenes for the final session this academic year. 

The meeting will be held from noon to 1:30 p.m. in the Rabb Room at Tisch College, and is open to all. A light lunch will be served. 

Eric Gordon, assistant professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College, and Gene Koo, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, will brief the group on their ongoing project to involve residents of Boston in using Internet technology to help shape the design of their neighborhood.

“What usually happens is the city brings people together and asks them yes-or-no questions about a proposal. Our idea is to adopt internet technology to ask people to be part of an actual design project run by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, not by developing blueprints, but by participating in a dialogue in ways never before possible,” Gordon explained.

Koo and Gordon are adapting Second Life, an online 3-D virtual world, to spur community dialog. Local residents will gather in a lab and view a design proposal in Second Life. Together, they will move objects around to see what the streetscape could look like under different arrangements.

“This is much more involved than looking at a model,” said Gordon. “They’ll play with the space, because Second Life allows you to build things and move things around together.”

While many of the millions of Second Life “residents” who currently access that virtual world do so independently, Gordon said that the Hub2 project, as it is known, brings people together to jointly address a problem. This, he said, accomplishes two goals: it gets people to share and respond to each other’s ideas, and it surmounts the digital divide which would prevent those without internet access or technical savvy from participating.

Hub2—the first initiative of its kind—was launched last September with partnerships and support from members of Emerson College, Harvard University, the City of Boston and the BRA.

Gordon’s work is focused on the social dimension of new media, with a special interest in place-based digital communities, social networking, and virtual environments. He is working on two book projects: The Urban Spectator: New Media and the American City and The Place of Social Media: How Networks Think Globally and Act Locally. In addition to his work on public urban spaces, he is also interested in public academic spaces. He is working on a project funded by the National Endowment for Humanities that explores the use of the social web in academic lectures and events.

Koo helped found Legal Aid University, which provides training and professional development to poverty lawyers across the nation. Prior to his appointment at the Berkman Center, he worked at Mass. Law Reform Institute, where he coordinated a knowledge management website for the state, helped develop a portal to educate Massachusetts residents on their legal rights, and advised on technical and practical implementation of a statewide case management system. He is also involved with efforts across several law schools to use virtual environments for legal instruction.

Co-sponsored by Tufts’ Sociology and Political Science Departments and Tisch College, CERG has provided an interdisciplinary cross-school forum since 2003 for people at Tufts, as well as individuals from other colleges and Tufts host communities, to share ideas and present work in progress relating to civic engagement research.

For more information and to be added to the email notification list, contactsusan.ostrander@tufts.edu or kent.portney@tufts.edu.

Urban Computing--Navigating Space and Context

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.

Download full intro paper