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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

http://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

http://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 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 !

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By Jan Seeburger, 03/08/2010 9:52 am

Date: Monday, 16 August 2010

Time: 10.30am – 12 noon

Place: QUT Kelvin Grove, A 105

Presenter: Jan Seeburger

Who should attend: QUT staff and students who are interested in WWDC, iPhone, and iPad programming

Abstract:
The presentation will cover the experiences gained through attending the Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June 2010 and how the Apple University Consortium (AUC) is supporting QUT staff and students to attend the event. Additionally the presentation will cover some of the new features of the iPhone 4 and the iOS4 for developing applications for mobile devices.

Additional information:
Apple WWDC http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/
AUC http://www.auc.edu.au/

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By Jan Seeburger, 23/04/2010 2:52 pm

QUT Urban Informatics iPhone app DispoMaps version 2 by Jan Seeburger now available

Download via iTunes:
http://bit.ly/cR2YN3

DispoMaps enables you to share your current location on an online map with anyone. The map is constantly updated as you go, using your iPhone’s GPS.

DispoMaps is easy to use. Launch the app, switch Location Sharing to “ON,” and decide how you want to share your location: via SMS, email, twitter, or facebook.

Your recipients will be sent a link to a unique web page displaying a map of your real-time location. Once you have arrived at your destination, you can easily dispose of your map by switching Location Sharing to “OFF.”

DispoMaps does not require user accounts. And the recipients of your DispoMaps do not even have to have the app installed.

Your privacy is protected: The web page does not contain any information that reveals your personal identity. DispoMaps allows you to stop sharing and dispose of your map whenever you want. For enhanced security, DispoMaps automatically expire after a set period of idle time.

What’s new in version 2.0
-       Major bug fixes
-       Major user interface improvements
-       Twitter integration
-       Facebook Connect integration

Download via iTunes:
http://bit.ly/cR2YN3

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By Jan Seeburger, 12/04/2010 8:27 am

Abstract

The increasing ubiquity of digital technology, internet services and location-aware applications in our everyday lives allows for a seamless transitioning between the visible and the invisible infrastructure of cities: road systems, building complexes, information and communication technology and people networks create a buzzing environment that’s alive and exciting. Driven by curiosity, initiative and interdisciplinary exchange, the Urban Informatics Research Group at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is an emerging cluster of people interested in research and development at the intersection of people, place and technology with a focus on cities, locative media and mobile technology. Our team comprises and collaborates with architects with degrees in media studies, software engineers with expertise in urban sociology, human-computer interaction designers with a grounding in cultural studies, and urban planners with an interest in digital media and social networking. Being hosted by the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation at QUT enables our projects to embrace the creative energy of a range of disciplines across design, performance, production and writing. Associate Professor Marcus Foth will present an overview of the projects that the Urban Informatics research group is currently working on. More information at: http://www.urbaninformatics.net/

Bio

Associate Professor Marcus Foth is Principal Research Fellow with the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia, and team leader of the Urban Informatics Research Group. He received a QUT Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellowship (2009-2011), and aSmart Futures Fellowship from the Queensland State Government (2009-2011), co-sponsored by National ICT Australia (NICTA). He was awarded the inaugural Australian Business Foundation Research Fellowship on Innovation and Cultural Industries 2010 sponsored by the Aurora Foundation. He was an ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow (2006-2008), and a 2007 Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK. Dr Foth’s research explores human-computer interaction design and development at the intersection of people, place and technology with a focus on urban informatics, locative media and mobile applications. The high quality of his research work has attracted over $1.7M in national competitive grants and industry funding since 2006. Dr Foth has published over 70 articles in journals, edited books, and conference proceedings. He is the editor of the Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics (2009), and is currently co-editing the book “From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen” for MIT Press (2010). He is the conference chair of the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies 2011 in Brisbane.

Followed by Afternoon Tea

RSVP to:
Sarah Turnbull
Administration Assistant
NICTA I PO Box 6020 I St Lucia QLD 4067
T +61 7 3300 8590 I F +61 7 3300 8420
www.nicta.com.au sarah.turnbull@nicta.com.au
From imagination to impact

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By Jan Seeburger,

12–6pm Saturday 1 and Sunday 2 May 2010
Who: NICTA
What: software, hardware, and leading experts showing you how to use it
Cost: TBA
Bookings: email The Edge

The city is full of information. NICTA is addressing the challenge of getting access to this information to connect with others, find out where cool things are happening, learn, and display information about the power we use, the food we eat, the environment we live in.

In this workshop you will learn how to tap into some of information the city has to offer. We will learn how to use Arduino micro-controller and hook up a variety of different sensors. We interpret the sensor results and share them to be used across different projects.

Once we’ve covered the basics you get to do your own project. Some basic understanding of programming will be helpful, however the course is targeted at beginners and you will be able to pick up the necessary skills as you go along.

What you will learn

• What is an Arduino, and how to use it
• How to program an Arduino
• How to build basic circuits
• How to share sensor information using Pachube
• How to visualising sensor information with hardware and software
• How to do your own cool Arduino projects

Course program

Day 1: Teaching and experimentation

Learn the basics about the Arduino platform, what it is how it works. Write your first program and upload it. Learn how to use a breadboard to build circuits. Experiment with different components and sensors. Learn a bit more about the programming language we use—Processing.

Day 2: Project/group work

During day 2 you will pick your own project to do as part of a group. We will help you to conceptualise your ideas and turn them into a hardware and software design. A day full of tinkering and fun.