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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, 11/04/2011 4:58 pm

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 Marcus Foth, 06/10/2010 12:05 pm

Sustainable Interaction with Food, Technology, and the City

This workshop explores innovative approaches to understanding and cultivating sustainable food culture in urban environments via human-computer-interaction (HCI) design and ubiquitous technologies in urban environments. We perceive the city as an intersecting network of people, place, and technology in constant transformation. Lift Workshop @Weimar explores mobile human-food interaction and the role of interactive media in engaging citizens to cultivate more sustainable everyday human-food interactions on the go. Interactive media in this sense is distributed, pervasive, and embedded in the city as a network. The workshop addresses environmental, health, and social domains of sustainability by bringing together insights across disciplines to discuss conceptual and design approaches in orchestrating mobility and interaction of people and food in the city as a network of people, place, technology, and food.

Speakers

• Mark Shepard, Assistant Professor, Departments of Architecture and Media Study at University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
• Katharine S. Willis, Researcher / Artist / Architect at University of Siegen
• Marcus Foth, Associate Professor / Principal Research Fellow at Queensland University of Technology
• Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow (Industry) at Queensland University of Technology

The presentations will be followed by a Q&A session with the speakers.

More information, and registration page:

http://liftconference.com/lift-at-home/events/2010/10/31/lift-workshop-weimar

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=154534607892420

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By Marcus Foth, 10/09/2010 12:02 pm

The first edition of Lift Workshop in Hungary sets the scene in the Eastern Quartier of Pécs at a historical coal mining site, an outstanding architectural merit, now part of the city’s cultural heritage. As European Capital of Culture in 2010, Pécs attracts international attention as a cultural pole on the periphery of the European Union.

Departing from this context Lift Workshop @ Hungary addresses the possibilities of new technologies in the socio-cultural periphery of a changing post-industrial urban landscape. It turns this particular locality and its challenges into the centre of the attention of architects, artists, social scientists from the region and from regional media labs with the objective to explore and connect with recent discussions regarding urban computing and situated technologies and extend the discourse to specific regional issues and problems.

The aim of the workshop is to explore the implications of urban information systems for architecture and urban design, disciplines that have been largely absent from the mostly technologist-driven discussions of “ubiquitous” computing but nevertheless can provide new insights and alternative perspectives on the implications of “networked objects” for urban culture, newly emerging spatial practices and organizational forms. During the workshop participants develop responses, scenarios applicable to Eastern Quartier and later other urban areas undergoing similar transformation.

Lift Workshop @ Hungary: Eastern Quartier is organized by Kitchen Budapest in collaboration with KÉK – Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre. To find out more about the organizers, our sponsors click here.

More information, and registration page:

http://liftconference.com/lift-at-home/events/2010/09/26/lift-workshop-hungary

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=144865162214052