Enhancing the Experience of People in Urban Public Places through Context-Aware Mobile Content and Services

PhD Confirmation Seminar by Mr Jan Seeburger
QUT Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation and Smart Services CRC

Life in the city is busy. We travel from one place to another and meet people at different locations for social, business, or entertainment purposes. Thereby, city dwellers cross streets, places, buildings, and other public and anonymous urban places using cars, public transport, or even just walk to their destination usually accompanied by Information and Communication Technology (ICT) devices. Urban dwellers use ICT devices such as mobile phones or MP3 players as “cocooning” items in public urban places to create their own personal space and therefore avoiding direct contact with surrounding strangers. Even when there is no signal, like in underground railways, people tend to use their devices for different purposes like playing games, listening to their favourite songs, or deleting old text messages.

Instead of using ICT devices to seclude oneself from the surrounding environment, such devices could also be used to connect in a meaningful way with other people in the actual urban place as well as past, present, or future people nearby.

The main goal of this PhD research is to provide applications and deliver guidelines to enhance the user experience of different public urban places during everyday idle time. This goal will be achieved through personalised services and content delivered via ICT devices, which consider and utilise the user’s past, current, and future context. The context data will be used to enhance and stimulate interaction with people who are collocated in the same public place.

This PhD project utilises digital augmentations of urban public spaces and urban dwellers to make the invisible data of our urban environment visible. The study takes place at the intersection of people, place, and technology and considers, applies, and extends existing concepts in the areas of human-computer interaction, sociology, psychology, and urban studies to enhance the experience of people in urban public places.

Date: Tuesday, 23 March 2010
Time: 14:00 – 16:00
Location: Queensland University of Technology, Creative Industries Precinct, Z2-310
Street: 10 Musk Ave
City: Kelvin Grove, Australia

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