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By Marcus Foth, 20/10/2011 9:52 am

Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK

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By Marcus Foth, 13/04/2011 11:02 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Jan Seeburger, 12/04/2011 7:43 pm

Fiction allows readers to relate to place in new and nuanced ways.
How do you imagine the city of Brisbane?
As part of a project investigating urban planning and the gentrification of inner city landmarks, QUT researchers developed six characters to help inform the design of city apartments.
Your task is to imagine how one of the six characters might inhabit the city of Brisbane. Use the short story form to develop your chosen character: give them a name, a voice, a back-story and a narrative.
Six winners, i.e. one per character, will be chosen by a panel of three judges. The winners will receive $200 prize money and have the opportunity to further workshop and edit their story with the view of publishing as part of an anthology.

Download the information pack and an entry form.

Australian Research Council Grant LP0882274 Respecting the Past, Imagining the Future: Using Narrative and New Media in Community Engagement and Urban Planning.

Competition closes 5pm Wednesday 8 June 2011

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By Jan Seeburger, 11/04/2011 5:19 pm

For the last several years the AUC (Apple University Consortium) awards a number of competitive and allocated national scholarships to students and staff at AUC member universities to attend Apple’s premier developer conference, WWDC (World Wide Developer
Conference).

This year Peter Lyle of the Urban Informatics Research Lab is among the (above-average) seven scholarships awarded to members of QUT!

WWDC is a hugely popular event (selling out thousands of tickets in a few hours this year) that brings together developers and representatives from around the world to both network with each other and learn about Apple’s current and upcoming innovations in technology. In addition to five days of interesting sessions, there is the unique opportunity to interact directly and receive technical assistance from the Apple engineers responsible for the technology that forms the basis of the iOS and OS X software platforms.

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By Jan Seeburger,

The Urban Informatics Research Lab is pleased to announce that three of our team members will be joining colleagues at the University of Oxford in the UK this year.

Two of our PhD students – Richard Medland and Mark Bilandzic – have been accepted to participate in the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme 2011 (OII SDP) to be held this July. The OII SDP brings together advanced doctoral students who are engaged in research that looks at the socio-cultural implications of the Internet. The students will have opportunities to share their knowledge with other high-achieving students from around the world, and learn from eminent academics in related fields. We have no doubt Richard and Mark will have a memorable and valuable time in beautiful summery Oxford. They join a growing group of Urban Informatics alumni who also participated in the program, starting with the lab’s Director, Associate Professor Marcus Foth, in 2004.

Our post-doctoral fellow, Dr Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, has been awarded a prestigious Visiting Fellowship at the Oxford Internet Institute. She will spend three months at the OII this year to further expand her current ARC Linkage research, Eat, Cook, Grow: Ubiquitous Technology for Sustainable Food Culture in the City. She will collaborate with colleagues at the OII and the Lincoln Social Computing Research Centre to examine the current contexts that influence individual dispositions towards and practices of eating, then analyse social, cultural, and technological challenges for active participation in creating sustainable eating cultures. She intends to compare the outcomes with the findings from different research sites including Brisbane, Australia; Seoul, South Korea; and Portland, Oregon, U.S.

We look forward to continued dynamic collaborations with the Oxford Internet Institute.

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By Jan Seeburger, 10/04/2011 12:52 pm

Time: 28 April · 09:00 – 10:30
Location: Z2-304 Creative Industries Precinct QUT Kelvin Grove Campus, Musk Avenue, Kelvin Grove, Australia

The Embodied Hybrid Space: Designing for Digital Encounters in Physical Environments

Mark Bilandzic
PhD Confirmation Seminar
QUT Urban Informatics Research Lab

https://www.urbaninformatics.net/people/mark/
Facebook event entry

The emergence of mobile and ubiquitous computing has created what is referred to as a hybrid space – a virtual layer of digital information and interaction opportunities that sits on top and augments the physical environment. The increasing connectedness through such media, from anywhere to anybody at anytime, makes us less dependent on being physically present somewhere in particular. This thesis focuses on the opposite: What is the role of ubiquitous computing in making physical presence at a particular place more attractive?

Acknowledging historic context and identity as important attributes of place, this thesis embarks on a ‘global sense of place’ in which the cultural diversity, multiple identities, backgrounds, skills and experiences of people traversing a place are regarded as social assets of that place. The aim is to explore how physical architecture and infrastructure of a place can be mediated towards making such invisible assets visible, thus augmenting people’s situated social experience. Thereby, the focus is on embodied media, i.e. media that materialise digital information as observable and sometimes interactive parts of the physical environment hence amplify people’s real world experience, rather than substituting or moving it to virtual spaces.

Guided by a design-oriented action research approach, this thesis investigates the case study of The Edge (http://edgeqld.org.au/), a Digital Culture Centre initiated by the State Library of Queensland (SLQ) in Brisbane, Australia. The Edge maintains the traditional values of libraries as hubs for knowledge and information, though not through books and information archives, but as a place for both planned and incidental collaboration between its visitors.

Design interventions of the case study at the Edge target at bridging spatial, temporal and social barriers to facilitate shared encounters between people that would not be possible otherwise. The resulting medium, a combination of physical and digital components is what the title refers to as the “embodied hybrid space”. The findings from the case study will produce actionable knowledge for the Edge, as well as other institutions in the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) sector with similar settings and goals in regards to place making.

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By Jan Seeburger, 05/11/2010 3:18 pm

Time : 25 February 09:00 – 10:30
Location: Z2 Block, Level 3, Room 306, Creative Industries Precinct, QUT, Musk Avenue, Kelvin Grove, Australia

Understanding the Implications of Networked Interactions on the Design of Public Urban Spaces

Kirralie Houghton
PhD Confirmation Seminar
QUT Urban Informatics Research Lab

https://www.urbaninformatics.net/projects/kirralie/

This study will investigate the impact of networked social interactions on the design of public urban spaces. The focus is on the function of public spaces as ‘third places’: these are places not defined as ‘home’ (first place), not ‘work’ (second place), but those other places where we ‘hang out’ (Oldenburg, 1989), a place that is familiar, comfortable, social and meaningful for everyday life.

The qualitative methodology of this study involves gathering data from two research sites, North Lakes, QLD and Canada Bay, NSW. It utilises a mix of qualitative methods including interviews, focus groups, and a design charrette to investigate the elements of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) on social communication practices for the enhancement and augmentation of physical public place. The data drawn from these investigations will be aligned with best practice for urban design and the key social elements that inform planning considerations. The analysis will focus on defining the new patterns of behavior for social practice and how these translate into use of physical public spaces in a ‘tech-savvy’ mobile age.

The aim of the research is to offer guidelines and directions for urban planners when designing public urban spaces in the age of ubiquitous and ‘everyware’ computing (Greenfield, 2006). These will be framed as patterns of use and linked to exemplar information and communication technology (ICT) and HCI projects that demonstrate how social engagement can be enhanced and supported within physical environments, and detailing the physical elements of place that have been shaped or the potential to be shaped by these technologies. Following the triad of urban informatics, the project is positioned at the intersection of urban planning (place), cultural geography and urban sociology (people), and ICT and HCI research (technology).

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By Marcus Foth, 04/11/2010 6:02 pm

Making Links and the QUT Urban Informatics Research Lab present Dr Tanya Notley, Tactical Technology Collective (and QUT iCi PhD graduate), in conjunction with the Participatory Design Conference PDC 2010 at UTS in Sydney:

Visualising Information for Advocacy

Tuesday 30 November. Half Day Tutorial (Morning)
Presenter: Dr Tanya Notley, Tactical Technology Collective

http://www.pdc2010.org/programme/tutorials/#Tutorial4

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=128689197186692

So you’ve got great data. Now what? Tactical Technology Collective are an NGO that helps rights advocates make sense of data, focus its use on their issue, and produce clear, compelling and accurate visualisations than can strengthen their campaigning. In this tutorial we’ll consider the process involved in analysing and then visualising information in collaboration with communities, organisations, researchers and other potential change makers so that it will resonate with the hearts and minds of a specific target audience. This workshop does not require you to have design skills: it will be an enjoyable, hand-on session that will focus on learning a transferable, participatory approach to conceptualise creative campaigns that visualise data and information. Creative campaigning examples from around the world will also be shared, decoded and discussed and the participants will take away copies of Tactical Tech’s guides, Visualising Information for Advocacy and Tactics for Turning Information into Action.

This tutorial will be of interest to social change designers, researchers, rights advocates and anyone else interested in turning information about an issue into action that can address it.

Registration: http://www.pdc2010.org/registration/

About the trainer:

Dr Tanya Notley is the Info-Activism Programme Lead with Tactical Technology Collective. Tactical Tech is an international NGO working at the point where rights advocacy meets information management and technology. Tanya has 15 years experience working with on media advocacy with research institutes, international development agencies and community-based organisations in Australia, the UK, Nepal, India and Sri Lanka. Tanya has produced training manuals and book chapters on radio production, digital storytelling, info-activism and participatory research methods and has delivered many workshops around the world on these topics.

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By Marcus Foth,

Guest Seminar by Douglas Schuler

17 Nov 2010, 2pm – 3.30pm

Queensland University of Technology
Kelvin Grove Campus, S Block, S403
Victoria Park Rd, Kelvin Grove QLD 4059, Australia

Please RSVP by 15/11/2010 to julieanne.edwards@qut.edu.au

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=154584687915847

Will We Be Smart Enough Soon Enough?
Putting Civic Intelligence into Practice

Civic intelligence names a phenomenon that takes place every day but is rarely recognized for what it is. It’s a manifestation of collective intelligence that is directed towards social and environmental progress. In short, it’s focused on attaining civic ends through civic means. Civic intelligence has particular relevance to people who are involved in education and work with the people in the real world. It helps describe examples as diverse as Evergreen State College’s Sustainable Prisons Project where prisoners are engaged in biology exploration, Seattle’s all-ages music venue, the Vera Project, and the Beehive Collective where art, popular education, and political action are creatively interwoven. Civic intelligence can help us determine the relative importance of projects and help us identify directions that are most likely to be relevant and fruitful in the design of projects. One of the most important tasks facing us is asserting — and of course demonstrating — the legitimacy and effectiveness of this orientation. And, of course, this task will require that we sharpen and employ our civic intelligence.

Biography

Douglas Schuler has been focusing on the intersection of society and technology for over 25 years. He has written and co-edited several books, including Participatory Design: Principles and Practices (Erlbaum, 1994), New Community Networks: Wired for Change (Addison-Wesley, 1996), and most recently, Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution (MIT Press, 2008), a multi-year undertaking (still in-work) with 85 contributors. He is president of the Public Sphere Project and former chair of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. For CPSR, Doug organized the Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing symposia series which was first convened in 1987. He is also a co-founder of the Seattle Community Network, a free, public access computer network supporting community and civic engagement that first went online in 1994. He is a member of the Faculty at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, a non-traditional liberal arts college, where he teaches programs that focus on the idea of civic intelligence. Doug has a masters degree in computer science (University of Washington) and a masters in software engineering (Seattle University). He is working on his PhD.

More information about Doug at: http://www.publicsphereproject.org/

Doug is in Australia courtesy of the QUT Urban Informatics Research Lab presenting a keynote at the Research for Action workshop on 15 Nov 2010 in conjunction with Making Links 2010, Perth, WA: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=101543753238750

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By Jan Seeburger, 03/11/2010 4:50 pm

The mobile, social energy monitor application EnergyWiz will be presented at the Google Developer Day 2010 conference in Munich! The conference, which takes place on November 9, is a one-day event featuring technical content on the latest Google developer products and will attract huge crowd of developers from all across Europe.
Although the event is a place where the Google development team presents their cutting-edge technologies, several non-Google projects were selected in the highly-competitive category “Interdisciplinary Prototyping” among which is EnergyWiz.

The presentation of EnergyWiz will be two-fold: first, the application developer – Petromil Petkov will give a talk before the Google developer community about the technology and the unique approach behind EnergyWiz; second, the attendees will have the opportunity to get a hands-on experience with the application during the “Innovation Sandbox” session.

Stay tuned for more information on this site or follow the development in Twitter @EnergyWizHQ !