Built Information

Massive light show projection on 28 Nov 2011 at the Millbank tower in London. The vj projection is part of the new advertising campaign for the Nokia Lumia 800. Advertising as a time and place-specific urban event…

From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen:
Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement

Edited by

Marcus Foth, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Laura Forlano, Cornell University, USA
Christine Satchell, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Martin Gibbs, University of Melbourne, Australia

Web 2.0 tools, including blogs, wikis, and photo sharing and social networking sites, have made possible a more participatory Internet experience. Much of this technology is available for mobile phones, where it can be integrated with such device-specific features as sensors and GPS. From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen examines how this increasingly open, collaborative, and personalizable technology is shaping not just our social interactions but new kinds of civic engagement with cities, communities, and spaces. It offers analyses and studies from around the world that explore how the power of social technologies can be harnessed for social engagement in urban areas.

Chapters by leading researchers in the emerging field of urban informatics outline the theoretical context of their inquiries, describing a new view of the city as a hybrid that merges digital and physical worlds; examine technology-aided engagement involving issues of food, the environment, and sustainability; explore the creative use of location-based mobile technology in cities from Melbourne, Australia, to Dhaka, Bangladesh; study technological innovations for improving civic engagement; and discuss design research approaches for understanding the development of sentient real-time cities, including interaction portals and robots.

The MIT Press

Foth, M., Forlano, L., Satchell, C., & Gibbs, M. (Eds.) (2011). From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

7 x 9 • 544 pp. • 108 illus. • ISBN 978-0-262-01651-3 • US$50.00 • cloth

About the Editors

Marcus Foth, Founder and Director of the Urban Informatics Research Lab, is Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow with the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology. Laura Forlano is a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University. Christine Satchell is Senior Research Fellow at the Urban Informatics Research Lab. Martin Gibbs is a Lecturer in the Department of Information Systems at the University of Melbourne.

For more information visit the MIT Press website: http://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262016513 or QUT eprints >

Section 1: Theories of Engagement

Foreword
Phoebe Sengers, Cornell University, USA

1. The Ideas and Ideals in Urban Media Theory
Martijn de Waal, University of Groningen, NL

2. The Moral Economy of Social Media
Paul Dourish, University of California, Irvine, USA, & Christine Satchell, QUT, Australia

3. The Protocological Surround: Reconceptualising Radio and Architecture in the Wireless City
Gillian Fuller, & Ross Harley, University of NSW, Australia

4. Mobile Media and the Strategies of Urban Citizenship: Control, Responsibilisation, Politicisation
Kurt Iveson, University of Sydney, Australia

Section 2: Civic Engagement

Foreword
Yvonne Rogers, Open University, UK

5. Advancing Design for Sustainable Food Cultures
Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, QUT, & Eli Blevis, Indiana University, USA

6. Building Digital Participation Hives: Toward a Local Public Sphere
Fiorella de Cindio, & Cristian Peraboni, University of Milano, Italy

7. Between Experience, Affect, and Information: Experimental Urban Interfaces in the Climate Change Debate
Jonas Fritsch, & Martin Brynskov, Aarhus University, Denmark

8. More than Friends: Social and Mobile Media for Activist Organizations
Tad Hirsch, Intel People and Practices Research, USA

9. Gardening Online: A Tale of Suburban Informatics
Bjorn Nansen, Jon Pearce, & Wally Smith, University of Melbourne, Australia

10. The Rise of the Expert Amateur: Citizen Science and Micro-Volunteerism
Eric Paulos, Sunyoung Kim, & Stacey Kuznetsov, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Section 3: Creative Engagement

Foreword
Gary Marsden, University of Cape Town, South Africa

11. Street Haunting: Sounding the Invisible City
Sarah Barns, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

12. Family Worlds: Technological Engagement for Families Negotiating Urban Traffic
Hilary Davis, Peter Francis, Bjorn Nansen, & Frank Vetere, University of Melbourne, Australia

13. Urban Media: New Complexities, New Possibilities — A Manifesto
Christopher Kirwan, & Sven Travis, Parsons — The New School for Design, USA

14. Bjørnetjeneste: Using the City as a Backdrop for Location-Based Interactive Narratives
Jeni Paay, & Jesper Kjeldskov, Aalborg University, Denmark

15. Mobile Interactions as Social Machines: Poor Urban Youth at Play in Bangladesh

Andrew Wong, & Richard Ling, Telenor Research & Innovation, Malaysia

Section 4: Technologies of Engagement

Foreword
Atau Tanaka, Newcastle University, UK

16. Sensing, Projecting and Interpreting Digital Identity through Bluetooth: From Anonymous Encounters to Social Engagement
Ava Fatah gen. Schieck 1, Freya Palmer 2, Alan Penn 1, & Eamonn O’Neill 2
1 University College London, UK, 2 University of Bath, UK

17. The Policy and Export of Ubiquitous Place: Investigating South Korean U‐Cities
Germaine Halegoua, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

18. Engaging Citizens and Community with the UBI-Hotspots
Timo Ojala, Hannu Kukka, Tommi Heikkinen, Tomas Lindén, Marko Jurmu, Simo Hosio, & Fabio Kruger, University of Oulu, Finland

19. Crowdsensing in the Web: Analyzing the Citizen Experience in the Urban Space
Francisco C. Pereira, Andrea Vaccari, Fabien Giardin, Carnaven Chiu, & Carlo Ratti, Senseable City Lab, MIT, USA

20. Empowering Urban Communities through Social Commonalities
Laurianne Sitbon, Peter Bruza, Renato Iannella, & Sarath Indrakanti, National ICT Australia

Section 5: Design Engagement

Foreword
Mark Blythe, University of York, UK

21. A Streetscape Portal
Michael Arnold, University of Melbourne, Australia

22. Nonanthropocentrism and the Nonhuman in Design: Possibilities for Designing New Forms of Engagement with and through Technology
Carl DiSalvo, & Jonathan Lukens, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

23. Building the Open Source City: Changing Work Environments for Collaboration and Innovation
Laura Forlano, Cornell University, USA

24. Dramatic Character Development Personas to Tailor Apartment Designs for Different Residential Lifestyles
Marcus Foth, Christine Satchell, Mark Bilandzic, Greg Hearn, & Danielle Shelton, QUT, Australia

Epilogue

Judith Donath, MIT, USA

“I wish this was” project: local citizens as placemakers …

Using digital media technologies for collective urban issues

Our everyday lives are increasingly shaped by digital media technologies, from smart cards and intelligent GPS systems to social media and smartphones. How can we use digital media technologies to make our cities more social, rather than just more hi-tech?

This international conference brings together key thinkers and doers working in the fields of new media and urbanism. Keynote speakers such as Usman Haque, Natalie Jeremijenko will speak about the promises and challenges in this newly emerging and highly interdisciplinary field of urban design. The keynotes will be accompanied by presentations of ‘best practices’ from various disciplines, such as architecture, art, design, and policy.

Some more pecha kucha presentations on “Changing research”
from the Forum on Future Cities.

“Changing Life” Panel Presentations from
Senseable City Lab | Forum on Future Cities, April 2011

The upcoming alpha-ville festival in London features a whole line of interesting workshops, screenings and live action…

Modkit is an in-browser graphical programming environment for microcontrollers. Modkit allows you to program Arduino and Arduino compatible hardware using simple graphical blocks and/or traditional text code. Modkit’s graphical blocks are heavily inspired by the Scratch programming environment developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab.

Getting Started

Our first public preview is live! We know many of you have been following the project and can’t wait to try it out. If you’re a Mac user, you can go ahead and download the desktop component that you’ll need to connect to your device from the online Modkit editor and get started. Windows and Linux versions are coming soon so check out our blog to follow our progress. Read More or view the old site.

Art initiative to turn nyc time square into a large art space!
Here’s how they progress…

Very good overview of recent examples of media architecture. However, I personally think that some more earlier examples (e.g. by Nicholas Schöffer (”Mur lumière”), Mischa Kuball (Megazeichen), Christian Möller (Kinetic light sculpture), Joachim Sauter/Christian Möller (Networked Skin) would add to its significance as a “historic overview”.

The timeline depicts international media facades with their different artistic, social or brand messages up to interfaces like iPhone Apps or brain sensors for public participation. The movie is a shortened version of the lecture, „The semiotics of media facades – When buildings start to twitter” that was presented at the Parsons The New School for Design in New York in 2010.

Luminous tweets and retweets
During the day, façade structures with their windows and material combinations grant a specific building image to the public. However, after sunset electrical light is the medium for an architectural image. The light appearance sends an atmospheric signal to the citizens like hang on in front of an asleep structure, look at an inviting but static façade or enjoy a vivid architecture sharing short stories. In the last decade, media facades have become a widespread element for luminous tweets. They establish a network between the building owner and the citizens, sometimes driven by aesthetical debates, other times by commercial intentions to avoid traditional light advertisement.
The pursuit of persuasion by way of big screens gives the impression that size receives a higher relevance than content, comparable with the large amount of trivial tweets in Twitter. Various media facades appear as monumental monologues repeating a fixed animation daily. A few facades use signals from the environment and transform them into a play of light and shadow. Others emerge as urban dialogues when buildings show combined moving pictures. Some even allow people to send messages to the building to receive luminous retweets. They turn the city into a community following the dialogue and with the respective Apps may possibly even gain a following community worldwide.

The historical overview of international projects covers various lighting methods and techniques from lighting designers as ag4, Arup Lighting, blinkenlights, Fusion, LAb[au], Licht Kunst Licht, L´Observatoire International, Mader Stublic Wiermann, Okayasu Izumi, magic monkey, Matthew Tanteri, Onur Sonmez , Qosmo, realities:united, Rogier van der Heide, StandardVision, Urbanscreens, Uwe Belzner, Yann Kersalé and architecture like Asymptote Architecture, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, O.M. Ungers, Peter Cook, Peter Marino, UN Studio, schneider + schuhmacher, Simone Giostra, WOHA architects1. Artists like Doug Aitken, Jaume Plensa, Kurt Hentschläger and Zhong Song are included in the timeline as well.

The clip has been put together by Thomas Schielke
arclighting.de