workhop: engaging the city
Engaging The City: Public Interfaces As Civic Intermediary
W1. Engaging The City: Public Interfaces As Civic Intermediary
The premise for this workshop was to bring members of the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community together with researchers and practitioners from the fields of urban planning, architecture, and design, who are interested in similar issues, in an effort to critically examine the interrelationship of technology and the urban environment.
We strongly believe that we have succeeded in creating a workshop in a format that challenged our participants to step out of their comfort zones and to collaborate with like minds to come up with impressive ideas. We would like to thank all our participants for giving us two days of their time and energy. We hope everyone enjoyed their workshop experience.
In putting together this workshop we tried to design an unusual program. One that would continually challenge our participants and make the experience both educational and memorable. We created a program that provided a limited amount of structure and focus for exploratory activities, allowing participants to come up with radically different concepts that adequately addressed the problem at hand. This website is the archive of the workshop: its process and its results.
Main themes that emerged during the workshop:
This workshop is designed to explore notions of exchange within an urban landscape. In the course of the workshop, we posed a series of questions for our participants:
What relationships do we have with the city?
What do we give and take from it and each other in its embrace?
How is this exchange enacted in and upon the city in everyday life?
And how can technological innovation capture or foster this exchange?
In the course of the workshop, the following themes emerged as responses, both to the questions we posed, and the specifics of the workshop design:
Diversity - we are still homogenous - recognizing it and designing for barriers
Participatory - what would it look like if we were to engage in particular groups and particular situation
Amenable to public dialog in its development process
Framework rather than object/product
Designing systems that are extensible
Focus on walking - the workshop had a walking-fieldwork component
Transitions between places - public/private/open/closed
Boundary areas
Blurred boundaries/clear barriers
Although the workshop ended, we would like to continue this conversation, because we believe it is important to consider these issues in view of an increasing number of technologies appearing in city spaces. City publics vary in their socio-economic status which necessarily dictates that they will vary in which technologies they can/will access and how they will/can use them. At this juncture, we believe that it is instructive and necessary to consider issues of barriers, access, divide, blending, transitions and boundaries as a part of the conversation of information and communciation technologies in the city. We hope that this website and our subsequent work will help foster this conversation both in academic and in practitioner circles and maybe even help combine the two.
W1. Engaging The City: Public Interfaces As Civic Intermediary
The premise for this workshop was to bring members of the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community together with researchers and practitioners from the fields of urban planning, architecture, and design, who are interested in similar issues, in an effort to critically examine the interrelationship of technology and the urban environment.
We strongly believe that we have succeeded in creating a workshop in a format that challenged our participants to step out of their comfort zones and to collaborate with like minds to come up with impressive ideas. We would like to thank all our participants for giving us two days of their time and energy. We hope everyone enjoyed their workshop experience.
In putting together this workshop we tried to design an unusual program. One that would continually challenge our participants and make the experience both educational and memorable. We created a program that provided a limited amount of structure and focus for exploratory activities, allowing participants to come up with radically different concepts that adequately addressed the problem at hand. This website is the archive of the workshop: its process and its results.
Main themes that emerged during the workshop:
This workshop is designed to explore notions of exchange within an urban landscape. In the course of the workshop, we posed a series of questions for our participants:
What relationships do we have with the city?
What do we give and take from it and each other in its embrace?
How is this exchange enacted in and upon the city in everyday life?
And how can technological innovation capture or foster this exchange?
In the course of the workshop, the following themes emerged as responses, both to the questions we posed, and the specifics of the workshop design:
Diversity - we are still homogenous - recognizing it and designing for barriers
Participatory - what would it look like if we were to engage in particular groups and particular situation
Amenable to public dialog in its development process
Framework rather than object/product
Designing systems that are extensible
Focus on walking - the workshop had a walking-fieldwork component
Transitions between places - public/private/open/closed
Boundary areas
Blurred boundaries/clear barriers
Although the workshop ended, we would like to continue this conversation, because we believe it is important to consider these issues in view of an increasing number of technologies appearing in city spaces. City publics vary in their socio-economic status which necessarily dictates that they will vary in which technologies they can/will access and how they will/can use them. At this juncture, we believe that it is instructive and necessary to consider issues of barriers, access, divide, blending, transitions and boundaries as a part of the conversation of information and communciation technologies in the city. We hope that this website and our subsequent work will help foster this conversation both in academic and in practitioner circles and maybe even help combine the two.