In the meanwhile, here is an overview of our best read articles since we started our research project in 2007:

1. review: Kevin Lynch – The Image of the City (book review)
2. Picnic 09 Report 2: The City as an Interaction Platform (conference report)
3. Towards a Myspace urbanism? (The Mobile City Essay)
4. Interview with Mark Shepard: ‘critical design’, architecture, urbanism and location based media (interview)
5. Storytelling with Locative Media: Michael Epstein’s take on ‘terratives’ (conference report)
6. Semantic Wayfinding, mental maps and the keyhole problem of GPS-navigation (lecture report)
7. Digital Cities 6: urban media / urban informatics and different notions of public space (conference report)
8. Urban Play: designing the urban landscape (exhibition review)
9. Augmented reality on the mobile: MoMo Amsterdam #11 (lecture report)
10. Scott McQuire’s The Media City (bookreview)
11. Review: “Portable Objects in Three Global Cities” by Mimi Ito et al. (book review)
12. review: Stephen Graham – The Cybercities Reader (2004) (book review)
13. Augmented Reality: its promises and shortcomings for architects (lecture report)
14. Design Approaches for the 21st Century City (The Mobile City Essay)
15. ISEA 2008: Visualizing the Real Time City (Conference Report)

And in addition some personal favourites that didn’t make it into this list:

• Cartography: the old versus the new? an evening in De Balie (lecture report)
• “How can architects relate to digital media?” TMC keynote at the ‘Day of the Young Architect’ (The Mobile City Essay)
• Interview with Adam Greenfield on designing for urban computing (interview)
• Three philosophical questions about the ’sentient city’ – a response to the exhibition Towards the Sentient City (The Mobile City Essay)
• ISEA 2008: Locative Media Core Works & Classifications (Conference Report)

Enjoy!

29 June – 2 July 2011, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

http://ct2011.urbaninformatics.net/

The biennial Communities and Technologies (C&T) conference is the premier international forum for stimulating scholarly debate and disseminating research on the complex connections between communities – both physical and virtual – and information and communication technologies.

C&T 2011 welcomes participation from researchers, designers, educators, industry, and students from the many disciplines and perspectives bearing on the interaction between community and technology, including architecture, arts, business, design, economics, education, engineering, ergonomics, information technology, geography, health, humanities, law, media and communication studies, and social sciences. The conference program will include competitively selected, peer-reviewed papers, as well as pre-conference workshops, a doctoral consortium, and invited keynote and panel speakers.

We look forward to welcoming you to an exciting conference in Brisbane, Australia’s new world city.

Marcus Foth, Conference Chair

Important Dates

• 10 December 2010: Full papers and workshop proposals due
• 24 January 2011: Review reports due
• 18 February 2011: Notification of acceptances sent to authors
• 4 March 2011: Camera ready papers due
• 30 April 2011: Workshop papers, Doctoral Consortium and Student Volunteer applications due
• 29 June 2011: Pre-conference workshops and Doctoral Consortium
• 30 June – 2 July 2011: C&T 2011 conference at QUT, Brisbane, Australia

Conference Topics

C&T 2011 welcomes contributions in all areas of community and technology research, design and development. In addition, we particularly invite authors to address any of the following topics:

• Augmented Reality
• Civic Intelligence
• Context and Location Awareness
• Community-centred Design and Evaluation Methodologies
• Community Engagement
• E-research with Communities
• E-government and E-governance
• Participation
• Smart Community Services
• Sustainability
• Universal Usability and Accessibility
• Urban Informatics
• Tangible Interfaces for Community Interaction
• Technologies of Scale Making
• Visualisation Techniques
• Working across Cultures

Paper Submissions

All submissions must be written in English. Papers must be no longer than 10 pages, including all additional material such as references, appendices, and figures. Please format papers using the ACM SIGCHI two column layout available at http://www.sigchi.org/chipubform. Full papers must include a title, sufficient space for the author name(s) to appear on the paper, contact information and affiliations, abstract, keywords, body, and references. Papers submitted by the due date will undergo a double blind peer review process by an international panel and evaluated on the basis of their significance, innovation, academic rigour, and clarity of writing. Accepted papers will be included in the published conference proceedings if at least one author of any accepted submission has registered and attends the conference. Papers are submitted via an online submission system that will be opened in September 2010.

Please send any questions to Jesper Kjeldskov, Technical Program Chair: jesper AT cs.aau.dk

Workshops Proposals

Workshops are half day or full day sessions prior to the main conference program on 29 June 2011. Workshop proposals (max of 2 pages, using the ACM SIGCHI two column layout available at http://www.sigchi.org/chipubform) should be aimed at a community with a common interest. If you are working in an emerging area of Communities and Technologies, consider organising a workshop as an opportunity to advance the field and build momentum. C&T workshops might address basic or applied research and practice, new methodologies, emerging application areas, design innovations, management and organisational issues, or education. Each workshop should generate ideas that give the C&T community a new, organised way of thinking about the topic, or ideas that suggest promising directions for future research. Some workshops result in edited books or special issues of journals; you may consider including this goal in your workshop proposal.

Please send proposals to Jaz Choi, Workshop Chair: h.choi AT qut.edu.au

Doctoral Consortium

The Doctoral Consortium is scheduled prior to the main conference program on 29 June 2011. The Doctoral Consortium offers research students a special forum where they can present, discuss and progress their research plans with peers and established senior researchers. Research students wishing to attend the consortium should submit 4 pages, using the ACM SIGCHI two column layout available at http://www.sigchi.org/chipubform, addressing 4 headings: Aims and Background; Significance and Innovation; Methodology; Questions and Issues (that is, identify those areas you seek feedback on). Places at the consortium will be offered based on a review of the submitted proposals.

Please send applications to Christine Satchell, Doctoral Consortium Chair: christine.satchell AT qut.edu.au

Volunteers

C&T actively encourages students to volunteer at the conference. Being a student volunteer is a great way to support the research community, meet other students in the field, and attend an international ACM conference. You will help the conference organisers with the running of the conference and support the setting-up of presentations and workshops. You will see the latest in C&T research and development, and have fun while learning about running the conference. In return, you will get free registration. To apply, email us your contact details (email, phone, university), an abstract of your research project, a CV, and the reasons why you would like to be a student volunteer. Applications close on 30 April 2011.

Please send applications to Ronald Schroeter, Volunteers Chair: r.schroeter AT qut.edu.au

For more information on the project see the blog: http://etaksonglines.wordpress.com/

Contact Esther Polak if you are interested or would like to learn more about the project: esther [AT] estherpolak [DOT] nl

Demonstrations: Selena Savic (SRB), Piet Zwart Institute | David Benque (FR), Royal College of Art | Michael Dotolo (US), Frank Mohr Institute | Renee Hulshoff (NL), Royal Art Academy | Gabriel Vanegas (CO), Academy of Media Arts Cologne | Oliver Goodhall (UK), Royal College of Art

Performance: Joram Kroon, a.k.a. Prace (NL), Utrecht School of the Arts

http://www.v2.nl/events/test_lab-the-invisible-city

As Italo Calvino illustrates in his classic novel Invisible Cities, the notion of ‘city’ extends far beyond its visible physical architecture. A city is characterized as much by the ways in which its urban life is organized, the problems and threats it faces and the memories, desires and fears of its inhabitants, as by the buildings and spaces that define its physical form. Due to the rapid and ongoing process of urbanization – resulting in half of humanity now living in urban environments – we are forced to radically rethink our cities. While we can see our physical urban environments transforming at a rapid pace however, who is rethinking the ‘invisible’ counterparts that Calvino wrote about almost forty years ago?

Artists, architects, and designers play an important role in revealing ‘invisible’ aspects of cities, often providing new insights into how our cities function and develop. To rethink the ‘invisible city’ under the pressure of rapid urbanization, this edition of Test_Lab will feature a selection of freshly graduated artists, architects, and designers from European art and design academies whose projects explore the invisible aspects of our contemporary urban environments. The selected projects range from artistic representations of invisible cities, to simulations of urban economy and concrete scenarios for urban production and energy development. As it is custom to the Test_Lab event series, the audience will form the critical test panel for the demonstrated works and will be invited to examine each graduation project ‘hands-on’.

The evening kicks off with an introduction by the Rotterdam-based urban mapping expert Theo Deutinger, features a special opening of Disrupting Systems (see inset), and closes with a live music set about one of the world’s most conflict-ridden places.

For more information contact

Brady Martin

United Nations

Industrial Development Organization

?????????

?????????

Phone/?? +86 (10) 6532 7699 x 804

http://www.unidoitpo.org.cn

brady [AT] unidoitpo [DOT] org

City Centered is a free, three-day festival of locative media and urban community in San Francisco. The event includes demonstrations and installations in the Tenderloin district, a symposium in the Mission district and community training workshops.

Over two weekends, it will engage artists, educators, civic organizations and community members of all ages in exploring how how locative media can act as a platform and venue for community-led expression.

http://citycentered.org/

New Use of Cellular Networks
The Necessity of Recognizing the Nuances of Privacy

According to media researcher Martijn de Waal, it is time to rethink our ideas of privacy. The growing use of cellular networks is generating data that plays an important role in civil society projects. To be able to continue using such data in a meaningful and fair way, people must become aware of the fact that privacy is not only a question of either private or public, but includes many gradations in between.

During the Notte Bianca 2007 (an event in Rome comparable with the Museum Night in the Netherlands), researchers from MIT’s SENSEable City Lab set up at different urban locations a number of big screens upon which they projected dynamic maps of the city. Light blue spots indicated large numbers of people, thus enabling visitors to the event to immediately see which museum was crowded and plan their route accordingly. Making the task even easier, yellow stripes representing Rome’s municipal buses could be followed live on the same map. This project – ‘WikiCity Rome’ – sounds like a nice gimmick. The researchers gained access to the location data of mobile phone users through a telecom company. The anonymized coordinates of individual phones were combined to compile an algorithm of a – handsomely designed – real-time map of nighttime Rome.1

But ‘WikiCity Rome’ was more than just a gimmick. The project made use of an important shift in the functionality of the mobile phone (or ‘cellphone’, as it is called in parts of the English-speaking world). It is no longer simply a means of communication. Increasingly, the mobile phone is also being used as a sensor that gathers information about us and our surroundings.2 Location coordinates, images and sounds can be recorded and shared with friends, colleagues, social institutes or even with others who are unknown to us. This new use of mobile phones can have great social consequences, but it also raises questions about privacy. Who has access to all of this data we are gathering? To whom does this information actually belong? To us? The telephone company? Or should it – in anonymous form of course – be considered common property? Ought the government be allowed to monitor our movements in times of emergency? And if so, precisely what constitutes an emergency?

For the American civil rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), these developments are sufficient reason to introduce a new category of privacy: ‘locational privacy’. Will we still be able to move through a city in the near future without the places we go to being systematically recorded in all sorts of databases?3 The new developments are so far-reaching that we must ask ourselves whether our traditional idea of privacy is still tenable. The discussion is no longer only about the right to be able to act anonymously in our private lives without the government or our employers looking over our shoulders. In many instances, people will actually want to voluntarily make information about their private lives public. For the fact of the matter is that this can also have certain advantages, both for individuals and for society as a whole. But precisely what are the conditions under which this occurs? What possibilities does technology offer for sharing or protecting information? In this essay, I would first like to give a number of examples of how the use of the mobile phone as a sensor encroaches upon our lives in today’s society. Then I will go into the consequences of this for the debate on privacy and technology.

Scientific Research: A New Form of Demography?

Researchers in various disciplines are extremely enthusiastic about the mobile phone as a means of collecting data. Finally, they sigh, we can chart the behaviour of an entire population in real time instead of taking a few random samples afterwards. ‘Reality Mining’ is the name of the new discipline in which different streams of data are combined to get a handle on complex social processes. Social scientists often speak in slightly euphoric terms about these new possibilities. For instance, take Alex Pentland of the MIT Medialab: ‘By using data from mobile phones . . . we can create a “god’s eye” view of how the people in organizations interact, and even “see” the rhythms of interaction for everyone in a city.’4 This new method of measuring not only gives better insight into social processes, claims Pentland, it also has greater predictive value. Traditional demography, he states, is a bad predictor of behaviour. How old someone is, where they live and even their income is interesting information, but says little about how that person will behave in the future. Only when you can actually analyse their behaviour, can you – within certain margins – start predicting. Says Pentland: ‘The fact that mobile phones have GPS means that we can leap beyond demographics directly to measuring behaviour. Where do people eat? Work? Hang out? How does word of mouth spread? Analysis of travel patterns using mobile phone GPS data, for instance, allows discovery of the independent subgroups within a city.’5

At present, the mobile phone is already being used in this manner for health care research. In Kenya, for example, mobile phone data is being used to localize breeding grounds of infection for malaria. Other scientists have developed algorithms with which – again through data generated by mobile phone use – behavioural patterns that indicate the outbreak of a cholera epidemic can be identified. In the Dominican Republic, research into the spread of HIV is being conducted in a similar fashion.6

Urban planners are also enthusiastic about this new way of collecting information. The British ‘Cityware’ project tracked visitors to inner cities with the help of the Bluetooth technology on their phones.7 Here too, expectations are often high. Anthony Townsend, for instance, a researcher specialized in technology, sees the rise of networked sensors as a development comparable to the rise of aerial photography. For urban planners, that was a revolutionary media technology: for the first time, they could see the city from above, as a whole. And if aerial photography reveals the city’s skeleton, we now have a view of its nervous system. For the first time in history, people often optimistically say, we can observe all sorts of social interactions in the city in real time.

A little perspective is not out of place here, however. Although these methods of gathering data certainly can lead to new insights, the debate still does not address the question of exactly what kind of knowledge they actually produce. Data is not the same as knowledge, and so far the nature of the data is primarily quantitative. Researchers now know how many people are at certain places at certain times, where they have come from and where they are going. But more qualitative aspects – why do people move as they do, and what is their experience of that? – still remain out of the picture as a rule.

Citizen Science

In the above instances, scientists work from the top down in collecting great amounts of data in order to analyse social processes. But the mobile phone can also be used to collect data from the bottom up, at the initiative of users themselves. ‘Biketastic’, a project aimed at bicyclists in the notoriously car-oriented city of Los Angeles that has been set up by the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, is one such example. This research centre from the University of California Los Angeles has developed a mobile phone app that bicyclists can use to collect data on their trips through the city and share it with one another. The app measures the location, distance and speed of the bicycle route, but also its comfort. The microphone measures the noise of the other traffic, while the accelerometer indicates whether the cyclist can smoothly cruise along or has to keep stopping and starting. The geographical data can later be linked with external databases: How much air pollution is there throughout the route? And what about traffic safety? By combining the data from different cyclists with external databases, after a while you also get a bicycle map of Los Angeles with which you can plan the most pleasant, safest, cleanest or fastest route.8

This is similar to a number of ‘Citizen Science’ projects, in which citizens use the mobile phone’s sensor capacity in order to work together for a specific purpose. Eric Paulos conducted research on campaigns in which neighbourhood residents charted the quality of the air with the help of mobile sensors. Such campaigns had many positive effects. The participants gained an increased awareness of the problem of air quality and their involvement in local politics improved.9 But there are also negative aspects: Just how trustworthy is the data that is collected? Can the results be influenced, for example by holding a sensor next to a car muffler?10

Personalized Locational Services

Finally, the use of the mobile phone as a sensor can also have advantages for individual users. The mobile phone makes it possible to register information about your life automatically. Services like Google Latitude or Bliin plot your movements through the city on a map. You yourself are always at the centre, surrounded by those of your friends who have the service turned on and voluntarily share their data with you. Other services, like Yelp in the USA, also centre the map on the user’s position and then place balloon markers for the nearest pizzeria, optician, cash dispenser, taxi or other search command. Companies like Sensenetworks can also make analyses of your spatial behaviour and use that to recommend all sorts of services to you.

Christophe Aguiton, Dominique Cardon and Zbigniew Smoreda – researchers at Orange Labs, the R&D department of France Telecom – call this phenomenon ‘Living Maps’. A map is no longer a static representation of a geographical reality but a dynamic reflection of social activities. In the long run, the advent of such maps can lead to a cultural shift. Right now, our social lives still largely consist of making appointments that we write down in our agendas. But after a while, a ‘map of opportunities’ might very well seem like a much more attractive idea. If you momentarily have nothing to do, simply take a look at your personalized map. Who is in the immediate vicinity right now to meet up with? What is there to do at a reasonable distance from where I am?11

Critics point out that this can have huge consequences for life in the city. Does it still leave any room for chance encounters with the unknown? Will we become ‘people without characteristic traits’ who slavishly follow the recommendations of our ‘clever’ systems? These are relevant and meaningful discussions, which I do not wish to go into further right now. In the second part of this essay, I prefer to examine the notion of privacy that is at stake with these new technologies.12

Who Is the Owner?

How does the advent of the mobile phone as a sensor relate to our thinking about privacy? In academic circles, a cautious consensus is becoming apparent: users should be the owners of their own data. No matter how you generate data – for example, through the sensors in your mobile phone – you must be able to access that data, wipe it out yourself, keep it saved securely, and decide what is going to happen with it. Only in very exceptional circumstances should the government be able to have access to such databases.13 A view like this could very well lead to new forms of inequality. Personal particulars are very attractive data for commercial parties, and some critics suspect that the selling of your personal data will be made attractive. People who don’t want to share their personal details with commercial parties will, for example, have to pay more for a mobile phone subscription.14

Precisely what does ‘data ownership’ mean for the analysis of information on an aggregated scale? Are researchers only allowed to collect data if phone users give them permission to do so? And is that permission also necessary if the data is only used for mapping group behaviour? After all, in such cases the individual information is swallowed up in the group profile and a link with individual behaviour can no longer be made. But then, who is allowed to collect this sort of information, and under what conditions? Should telephone companies collaborate on this, for example?

Erin Keneally and Kimberly Claffy – researchers at UC San Diego – argue in favour of regulation that takes into account the positive aspects of sharing data. At present, the rules are not always so clear about what is allowed and what is not. As a result, many parties react defensively to requests for sharing data. They prefer not to take risks, seeing as the debate on privacy escalates quickly. The idea of privacy as the absolute right to protection of personal particulars soon loses out to the possible social benefits of sharing data – such as in the above-mentioned instances in the area of health care, for example. Keneally and Claffy call upon researchers and the telecom industry to develop a new protocol that makes the sharing of data possible and at the same time limits the risks of improper use of sensitive information.

Nathan Eagle compares ‘reality mining’ with large-scale medical research projects. There too, extremely sensitive personal information is stored in databases, which is why there are strict rules for their use: only professionals have access to the information and they must sign in when they want to use the databases. Eagle therefore proposes that such protocols also be quickly set up for the use of sensor data from mobile phones.

Organizations like the Dutch ‘Bits of Freedom’ are concerned about these new developments. Information that is stored anonymously, warns this organization, does not always remain that way. ‘Better technologies are always being developed to strip anonymous data of their anonymity. What might not be a “personal detail” now can soon turn into one.’15 Researchers Aguiton, Cardon and Smoreda concur. More than once in the past, new technologies have made it possible to trace anonymous data to specific users.16

The EFF therefore proposes using cryptography to design systems such that sensor information can be used without having to store it. Technologically, this is a rather roundabout way, although possible: ‘But we need to ensure that systems aren’t being built right at the zero-privacy, everything-is-recorded end of that spectrum, simply because that’s the path of easiest implementation.’17

The Desire to Share Data

The EFF’s idea of using strong cryptography can protect personal sensor data. That might come in handy with a system like pay-as-you-drive, for example. But there are also situations in which users do want to share their data, albeit not necessarily always or with everyone.

In daily life, privacy is a complex and above all dynamic negotiation between various parties, argue researchers Paul Dourish and Leysia Palen. In social situations, what plays a role is not so much the fear of the state’s misusing information but is much more likely to be ordinary worries. People do not want to be embarrassed. They want to assert their authority or voice in a certain area. And they like to have control over their own lives. Because of this, we make different demands of privacy at different moments.

In social situations it is often more important to make yourself known than to protect your privacy. If you want to capitalize on your authority in a certain area, you have to be able to show the corresponding badges. With the help of all sorts of signs – varying from word choice to greeting rituals – we send out signals through which others can deduce our social status or background. Sometimes we want to give our opinion, or we benefit from letting others know who we are. Just how much we wish to reveal depends upon what estimate we make of a situation. Who exactly is the audience? What do we expect, hope or fear in regard to the situation? Privacy, in other words, is a question of ‘identity management’, in which we show or conceal different aspects of ourselves to different audiences in different situations.

Palen and Dourish’s most important point is that the use of the mobile phone as a sensor, combined with the storage of information in databases, changes the parameters of this privacy negotiation. The situations in which we find ourselves are originally spatial and temporal. They are physically limited, for instance by the four walls of a room, and have a certain duration. Both factors play an important role in the estimates we make. We can see who is present and who is not – and therefore who could call us to account for an eventual faux pas.

When we use automatic sensors to register our behaviour in all sorts of situations and share it with others – for instance through social networks – the nature of the situation changes. Suddenly, space, time and audience are no longer limited, and instead the registration of the situation can also be called up at other times and places. But can another audience actually interpret the original context of the situation properly? And maybe you would have acted very differently if you knew that the audience was going to be wider.

Researcher Danah Boyd has written about how this development can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings. As an expert on social networking, Boyd was approached by the admissions committee of a leading university. They had received an application from a student from South Central LA. In a letter describing his motivation, he wrote that he wanted to break away from the gang life there. But when the committee looked at his page on a social network, Myspace, they saw all sorts of symbols glorifying gang life. Was he making a fool of them? Boyd pointed out to the committee that there was also another possibility. The applicant’s Myspace page was intended for his classmates and neighbours, not the admissions committee. And in his neighbourhood the social pressure to be part of something is so high that the young man probably could do nothing else but post the gang’s insignia on his Myspace page.18

Similarly, a commotion arose over the Facebook website. There too, users can voluntarily keep a log of their activities, hobbies and other titbits of information. At first this was only possible on the person’s own page. But one day Facebook changed the setup of its site. All of the messages that users placed on their own page were now automatically published on the pages of all their ‘friends’. Facebook’s reasoning was that this way, friends would be better able to keep abreast of each other’s activities. Besides, hadn’t the information already been made public by users on their own page?

Facebook didn’t do much more than publishing what was already public. But many Facebook users thought otherwise. They saw a subtle difference between making something public on one’s own page, which others must make an effort to access, and automatically distributing that data.19 Once again, this was about the assessment that users make of their audience in determining what information they do or do not wish to make public. To be sure, the information was now being distributed among friends, but there were also subtle differences within that. Some friends might very well be difficult co-workers that a person would not want to offend by rejecting their ‘friendship request’. And people show different things to members of their family than they do to old school friends. Facebook does not make it possible to make that distinction.

Privacy as Design Criterion

At the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS, the research lab behind the earlier-mentioned bicycle project in LA) they therefore believe that privacy is an important responsibility for designers. There should be a system that gives users the possibility to decide for themselves what information they want to share with whom, under what conditions, and for what length of time.20 This is why it is important that designers develop systems that visualize information in an understandable way and that immediately make it clear
what sort of consequences certain settings can have.

CENS itself uses such an application in its Personal Environmental Impact Report (PEIR) project, in which data is again collected with the help of mobile phones. This information is then converted into a carbon footprint and simultaneously combined with databases on local air pollution. In this way, users not only learn how much they themselves contribute to air pollution but also how much pollution they are being exposed to. In a log file, users can see precisely how the system uses their data: what information is registered when, and uploaded and shared with whom. Eric Paulos argues that interfaces like this should also make clear how reliable such (collectively gathered) data are. It is important that users do not trust all flows of data blindly, but that they always remain aware that data can be manipulated, or even simply not collected accurately.21

Aguiton et al go one step further. Not only should users be able to have insight into the manner in which information about them is collected, they should also be able to manipulate that information. Users have the right to lie to the system about their actual whereabouts in order to protect their privacy, they claim.22

The above-mentioned examples show that our thinking about privacy has to be reconsidered. The sensor data collected by mobile phones can play an important social role, for example in the area of public health. Such data can – as in the ‘citizen science’ instances – play a role in civil society projects. And some people will experience sharing data with others as an enrichment of their lives.

Involved parties point out that many of the present regulations are inadequate. On the one hand, the positive aspects of sharing data anonymously should be given more attention. At the same time, the awareness must also grow that privacy is not a binary affair in which something is either completely public or completely private. Between the two extremes lie many gradations that by no means are always taken into consideration in the design of new technologies. And providers of location services and social networks, for example, should also be stimulated to give the many nuances of privacy in everyday life a place in their services.

1. See senseable.mit.edu/wikicity/rome/ for a summary of the project and, for an extensive analysis of the project, Francesco Calabrese, Kristian Kloeckl and Carlo Ratti, ‘WikiCity: Real-Time Location-Sensitive Tools for the City’, in: Marcus Foth (ed.), Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City (London/Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, 2009).

2. For example, see Eric Paulos, who maintains that there is an ‘important new shift in mobile phone usage – from communication tool to “networked mobile personal measurement instrument”’. Eric Paulos, ‘Designing for Doubt: Citizen Science and the Challenge of Change’, lecture for the conference ‘Engaging Data’, Cambridge, MA: SENSEable City Lab, 2009.
senseable.mit.edu/engagingdata/program.html

3. www.eff.org/wp/locational-privacy.

4. web.media.mit.edu/~sandy/.

5. Alex Pentland, ‘Reality Mining of Mobile Communications’, The Global Information Technology Report 2008-2009. World Economic Forum, 2009.

6. See Nathan Eagle, ‘Engineering a Common Good: Fair Use of Aggregated, Anonymized Behavioral Data’, lecture for the conference ‘Engaging Data’, Cambridge, MA: SENSEable City Lab, 2009.

7. www.cityware.org.uk.

8. See research.cens.ucla.edu and biketastic.com/.

9. Paulos, ‘Designing for Doubt’, op. cit. (note 2). Also see Jason Corburn, Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

10. Paulos, ‘Designing for Doubt’, op. cit. (note 2).

11. Christophe Aguiton, Dominique Cardon and Zbigniew Smoreda, ‘Living Maps: New Data, New Uses, New Problems’, lecture for the conference ‘Engaging Data’, Cambridge, MA: SENSEable City Lab, 2009. Also see recent lectures by Antoine Picon and Nanna Verhoeff, in which they respectively describe how digital maps can be understood as ‘media events’ or ‘performance of space’ instead of only a ‘systematic geographic representation’. www.themobilecity.nl/2008/01/22/mediacity-conference-weimar-the-design-of-urban-situations/ and networkcultures.org/wpmu/urbanscreens/2009/12/05/nanna-verhoeff-mobile-digital-cartography-from-representation-to-performance-of-space/.

12. See, among others, Marc Shepard and Adam Greenfield, Urban Computing and Its Discontents (New York: The Architectural League of New York, 2007); Jerome E. Dobson and Peter Fischer, ‘Geoslavery’, in: IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, Spring 2003.

13. Pentland, op. cit. (note 4).

14. Eagle, ‘Engineering a Common Good’, op. cit. (note 5).

15. www.bof.nl/2009/12/18/hoe-anoniem-zijn-anonieme-gegevens-eigenlijk/.

16. Aguiton et al, ‘Living Maps’, op. cit. (note 11).

17. www.eff.org/wp/locational-privacy.

18. Danah Boyd, ‘Do you See What I See? Visibility of Practices through Social Media’, LeWeb, Paris, 2009.

19. Danah Boyd, ‘Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence’, in: Convergence, vol.14 (2008) no. 1, 13-20.

20. Katie Shilton, ‘Four Billion Little Brothers? Privacy, Mobile Phones, and Ubiquitous Data Collection’, in: Queue, vol. 7 (2009) no. 7.

21. Paulos, ‘Designing for Doubt’, op. cit. (note 2).

22. Aguiton et al, ‘Living Maps’, op. cit. (note 11).

—
Open #19 Privacy, the main theme of Open #19, is a right that protects one’s private life, a right that is not only established by law but also has political and social significance. It can be experienced and observed differently by individuals and groups, depending upon their position in society and the desires and interests involved.
In this issue, the concept of privacy is examined and reconsidered from legal, sociological, media-theoretical and activist perspectives. The focus is not so much on deploring the loss of privacy but on taking the present situation of ‘post-privacy’ for what it is and trying to gain insight into what is on the horizon in terms of new subjectivities and power constructions.

This issue of OPEN will be launched during he opening weekend of the Berlin Biennial on Saturday June 12th. Philosopher and theorist Gerald Raunig will give his lecture ‘Beyond Privacy: Desiring DIVIDUALITY’, followed by an informal reception in the charming Villa Elisabeth.

Aaron Tan – Rad

Aaron Tan founded RAD (Hong Kong) in 1994. Leading a team of designers of multinational origin, the office incorporates the global nature of its urban architectural experiences to develop new contemporary Asian urban planning and architectural approaches. Aaron completed a theoretical research project on the Kowloon walled City which he started in Harvard. Part of the research & RAD projects have been published & exhibited in various international journals and biennales. Aaron has delivered public lectures in Asia, Europe and USA.

Caroline Bos – UNStudio
Caroline Bos (1959) studied History of Art at Birkbeck College of the University of London and Urban and Regional Planning at the Faculty of Geosciences, University of Utrecht. In 1988 she founded Van Berkel & Bos Architectuurbureau with the architect Ben van Berkel, extending their joint theoretical and writing projects to the practice of architecture. Realized projects include the Erasmus bridge in Rotterdam, museum Het Valkhof in Nijmegen and the Moebius house.

In 1998 Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos founded UNStudio (United Net). UNStudio presents itself as a network of specialists in architecture, urban development and infrastructure. Current projects are the restructuring of the station area of Arnhem, a shopping mall renovation in Kaohsiung, a masterplan for Basauri, a music theatre for Graz and the design and restructuring of the Harbor Ponte Parodi in Genoa. UNStudio has realized amongst others the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, a façade and interior renovation for the Galleria Department store in Seoul and a private villa in up-state New York.

Her lecture is titled ‘DEEP PLANNING – Relational Models for the Sustainable City’
and is an introduction to Caroline Bos’ and Ben van Berkel’s new book that will be published in August 2010: Caroline Bos & Ben van Berkel, ‘DEEP PLANNING – Relational Models for the Sustainable City‘, August 2010, UNStudio Amsterdam

(For the record, these were the two events: I was one of the co-hosts of the ‘Best Scene in Town‘ workshop organized by Waag Society. In this workshop participants were challenged to design an urban game with the help of the 7scenes locative platform. Kars Alfrink of Hubbub (a design studio specialized in physical social games for public space) and I were asked to give a brief introduction. Incidentally, one week earlier Kars Alfrink and The Mobile City’s Michiel de Lange as well as James Burke of Vurb were part of a panel on Visual Cities #03, that took place in De Verdieping.)

Pervasive Games as Games
The first and most apparent approach of pervasive games is to use traditional games as a metaphor. This means to think of the city as a playing board, and to translate or vary upon the gameplay and rules of existing games, be they traditional urban games (treasure hunt, tag), traditional games (trading games, strategy games, role playing games, rock-paper-scissors etc.) or console games (e.g. pacman). This approach fits in a broader development in which gaming is becoming a more physical activity, for instance through new interfaces such as the Wii. As Kars Alfring said:

Games are about doing stuff. You don’t read a game, you don’t listen to a game, you don’t watch a game (although you can do all of these), you DO a game (you play it). So at the core of any good game is an interesting activity.

Many now classic examples or urban gaming fall (partly) in this category, examples are Geogcaching, Botfighters, Pacmanhattan, Can you see me now?

Kars Alfrink talked about a street game he designed in Rotterdam called Changed your World.  Participants had to run around the city with giant flags. Alfrink said that the use of physical artifacts is good idea in the design of urban games. First of all they make clear to passers-by and regular urbanites that something special is going on. Moreover:

We had a lot of benefit from the flags we employed. Being physical artifacts, they had a lot of affordances that were readily available to us. This you don’t get in software, where you need to build every property of an object yourself.

Change Your World from Hubbub on Vimeo.

Pervasive Games as Performative Arts

Another  - and perhaps counterintuitive – metaphor to approach pervasive games is as theater, rather than as games. Many pervasive games are event based, staged performances and often include actors. The main difference between these game performances and more traditional theater is that the public has an active role in the performances, and that instead of a script or screen play, there is a set of rules that actors and audience have to follow. These rule sets make up a story engine, that drives the performance. This can be an exploratory event, or it may be incorporated in narrative structures. (For instance, last year we wrote about Michael Epstein’s (Founder of Untravel Media) take on ‘storytelling with  locative media‘, in which he discussed the role of gameplay in location based storytelling.)

Much of the work of Blast Theory (who produced classics such as Can You See Me Know,  Uncle Roy All Around You and Rider Spoke) falls into this category. While they presented earlier work as ‘games that happen simultaneously online and on the streets’, they have included direct references to theater in some of their more recent projects. Rider Spoke for instance is framed as a ‘work for cyclists combining theatre with game play and state of the art technology. The project continues Blast Theory’s enquiry into performance in the age of personal communication.’

Alfrink’s company Hubbub was involved in designing an opera staged in a Dutch town called Monster. The goal was to involve the audience as players,

One of the biggest challenges was to come up with a concept that would accommodate both a compelling story and a game-like participatory aspect. For this we sought inspiration in martial arts movies and ultimately arrived at an Enter the Dragon-like setup, which features a storyline mixed with fighting set pieces. The fights would be improvised on the basis of game rules. (We also took cues from games like Street Fighter and Pokémon for both story and character design.)

Much of the subsequent work for us went into prototyping and playtesting the ruleset. For each session we brought in a ruleset and played several matches, figuring out a balance between fun-to-play and fun-to-watch. All the matches were recorded and analyzed afterwards for improvements.

Pervasive Games as an extension of Urban Culture

In my own presentation at the 7scenes workshop I urged designers to approach pervasive games from the perspective of urban culture, rather than from the perspective of games. How can we add a certain playfullness to everyday urban situations, in order to enhance urban culture? I gave three examples of elements of urban culture that perhaps could be made more interesting by adding some playful touches to them.

• The city as a public space for deliberation, and democratic debate, as examplified by the Acropolis. I presented the example of the Climate on the Wall-project (see here for a more extensive description) designed  by the Danish Center for Digital Urban Living. This project is an interactive mediafacade where passers-by can arrange words in a certain order. This project was made playful by its allusion to  ‘magnetic poetry’ – the little magnets with single words that you can rearrange on your fridge door to create ‘poetry’.

• The City as a stage on which we ‘perform’ our identities. This is an idea that builds upon symbolic interactionism as well as on theories of ‘performativity’ by people like Erving Goffman and Jane Jacobs. These theories conceive of our daily lives as performances in which we continuously act out different social roles (we shift from being an office worker, a dad, a manager, a friend, a museum visitor, etc.). At the same time through the numerous small interactions in the city streets, over time trust is build between citizens. We could argue that social networks and especially location based ones (Foursquare, Gowalla) are stages on which we perform our identities in our times, and some of these have indeed added gameplay elements (For instance the  badges one  can earn through Forusquare).
• The City as an operating system. This approach departs from the idea that our cities of today generate numerous datastreams. We can aggregate these datastreams and build services on top of them. Think for instance of the ‘cabsense‘ app for the iPhone that collects gps-data generated by cabs, and uses that data to recommend the best corner nearby the user’s current locations to catch a cab. Can we now use these datastreams as input for playful interactions in the city? At the Visual Cities-event James Burke of Vurb presented their new Urbannode project that is partially based on this premise:

  The Urbanode Project from VURB on Vimeo.

  We are now entering an era where technology begins to weave together the desires of citizens and the services available to them in their environment in realtime. But what does the use of these new systems look like? It is quite clear that the first step to unlocking these possibilities is the mobile terminal, or ‘smartphone’. Users of such mobile devices have already become accustomed to the access to information that urban-oriented webservices available in the mobile browser provide: maps, transit times, weather information, etc. Even tasks like calling a cab or reserving a table at a restaurant have become like buttons on a remote control for the city. But what about more active uses of service made available in the environment? Applications, supported by new network hardware, more like airTunes, where anyone running iTunes can ‘discover’ nearby speakers and stream music to them wirelessly.

• The City as a community. This approach came up in Alfrinks talk, when he discussed Koppelkiek – a social photo collecting game he designed for a neighborhood in Utrecht. The goal was to ‘create a meeting place for diverse individuals in a troubled neighborhood. The game provided an excuse and a framework for strangers to have brief interactions with each other.’ In this game, the designers game up with changing ‘assignments’ for the players such as “Take a photo of yourself with someone else in front of his or her front door.” The game was a success because the designers took an effort to engage citizens in the game. They approached key figures in the neighborhood and set up a small shop as well. They also thought of a way to make a pervasive game as this physically visible in the neighborhood. This was done by exhibiting the photo’s in an old shop window.

Pervasive Games as Applied ‘Game Theory’ (Political & economic game theory that is, not a ludic one)

Although the idea of enhancing urban culture by adding game play elements to all sorts of urban situations can be an interesting one, there is also the risk (or opportunity, depending on whose perspective you take) of turning everyday life in a series of disciplining events or strategy games (hence the reference to game theory). Government agencies or insurance companies might want to promote certain behaviors and discourage others and hope to seduce citizens to comply with their wishes by adding gameplay elements and awarding points for all sorts of situations. A dystopian scenario that builds on this trend was recently described by Jessie Schell, who imagined a future in which amongst others your wifi enabled toothbrush would award you a number of points each time you brush your teeth. These points can then be redeemed at your insurance company to get a discount on your dental insurance. Schell calls this scenario the Gamepocalypse.

Urban Games and Architecture and Planning

During these sessions The Mobile City’s Michiel de Lange also addressed the relation between architecture and urban games. He discerned five levels to understand urban games (1) the city is often used as a model to construct an architecture of computer and video games; (2) the city itself has historically been understood in multiple ways as a game or playground; (3) pervasive games take digital games out to the streets and bridge the digital-physical distinction; (4) (serious) games are used in the process of (re)building actual cities; (5) urban games are a metaphorical lens through which to look at utopian and dystopian futures of cities. His presentation was based on an a (highly recommended) article he wrote in Second Nature.

The 3rd MediaCity conference will investigate how new media re-define social settings and urban spaces and how they influence architecture as well as media art & design in urban contexts, thus constituting new social and cultural practices.

Today, media create opportunities for diverse forms of connections between people and spaces, enabling and forming flows of information. New digital places for information and communication emerge, and the context of existing spaces is transformed by the joint impact of media and architecture, thus leading to new forms of social and cultural practices. The public sphere, the communication in ubiquitous networks, and the interaction with digital content will be a thematic focus. The conference addresses different approaches and methods of research. It will consist of three sessions and a workshop, exploring these themes in a focused way.

+++++ Session 1: MediaArchitecture +++++

Talks focus on the complex integration and mutual dependency, and the amalgamation of media and architecture. The innovative integration of contemporary media in architecture produces new forms of design and construction of the built environment, and challenges traditional models for how we conceive, perceive and interact within physical space. Best-practice examples from current architecture, urban space, and models and visions for the future will be presented.

+++++ Session 2: Social Practices and Public Spheres +++++

Talks focus on the implications of media in architectural and urban space on social practices. The cultural, social, political, and economical phenomena of the encounter between media and urban space will be investigated.

+++++ Session 3: Interaction and Engagement +++++

Encounters with interactive media and digital art & design, embedded in architectural and urban spaces, and their influence on cultural phenomena, is the main topic of the talks and presentations.

+++++ Workshops +++++

The workshop program will provide an opportunity to explore the conference themes in a more practical and experimental way. It aims to create an open and informal dialogue about the topics and methods, thus providing a forum for participants to share ideas, knowledge and technical experience. The workshops will offer insight into new technological developments. Examples from architecture and urban planning, as well as media art & design, will present new applications and interpretations for mobile and embedded media. Students of all levels are particularly welcome to submit works for this program, especially if they have demos or showcases of projects they would like to present to a wider audience. The workshops will be an opportunity to gain feedback and advice on these works.

+++++ Submission +++++

We are inviting academics, practitioners and activists to submit scientific papers for the conference and less formal presentations on practices for the workshop session. The submissions should be close to disciplines such as architecture, media art & design, urban studies, cultural and urban geography and sociology, using innovative ways and reflecting critically on processes, methods and impacts of public participation and technologies in the urban realm, within their theoretical and practical research, teaching, or activism roles.

- Please submit a paper of 2 to 4 pages as an extended abstract.

The conference language will be English.
- Papers will be submitted to external review by an international selected scientific committee (to be announced at the website).

The authors of accepted papers will have the chance to talk at the conference and present their work to an international scientific audience. Please note that accommodation and traveling expenses will not be reimbursed and registration fees for the conference apply for speakers accepted through the open call. This conference is organized by the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and co-funded by DFG.

Selected papers from the conference will be published in a digital, post-conference volume

Please submit your abstract as PDF with our easychair conference management software http://www.mediacityproject.org/2010/submission

or by E-Mail to: 2010@mediacityproject.org

+++++ Important Dates +++++

15 June 2010: Submission deadline (abstract)
End of July 2010: Notification of acceptance
15 September 2010: Submission deadline (full article for accepted submissions)
29 to 31 October 2010: Conference in Weimar, Germany

Contact: 2010@mediacityproject.org
Website: http://www.mediacityproject.org/2010

Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
- Prof. Dr. Jens Geelhaar, Chair of Interface Design, Faculty of Media
- Prof. Dr. Frank Eckardt, Chair of Sociology of Globalization, Faculty of Architecture
- Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dipl.-Des. Bernd Rudolf, Chair of Building Design, Faculty of Architecture
- Dr.-Ing. Sabine Zierold, Faculty of Architecture
- Dipl. postgr. Kunst u. öffentl. Raum, Dipl.-Des. Michael Markert, Faculty of Media

http://www.mobileunconference.com/

De Berlijnse muur is weg, maar door het scherm van je mobiele telefoon is hij gewoon weer te zien, precies waar hij ooit stond. De techniek die het mogelijk maakt: Augmented Reality, en het is nu enorm in het nieuws. Ook in Nederland, want een van de grote spelers is het Nederlandse bedrijf Layar.

http://www.setuputrecht.nl/content/unma-4

Deze avond een blik op de toekomst van deze spannende technologie. Wat zijn de mogelijkheden, maar vooral: waar gaat het geen? Zetten we binnenkort allemaal virtuele objecten op straat? Gaan we buiten op virtuele monsters jagen in AR games?

We stellen ook kritische vragen, zoals: zijn AR browsers wel echte browsers? Met een webbrowser kun je elke webpagina bekijken. Maar hoe zit dat met AR Browsers op je mobiel, komt daar ook een standaard voor? En: hoe kunnen we het beste hype van werkelijkheid scheiden?

Sprekers (in aanbouw):

Wikitude (toegezegd)
Een van de vroege spelers is het Oostenrijkse Wikitude.

Layar (searching..)
De Amsterdamse start-up is een van de grote spelers.

Wolfgang Hurst (toegezegd)
AR Researcher bij de Universiteit van Utrecht

With the participation of Platoniq, Douglas Repetto, and the working group formed by Andrés Burbano, Alejandro Araque, Alejandro Duque, and Alejandro Tamayo.

Interactivos?’10 is a workshop which develops projects gathering and putting into action collaboration and local urban knowledge networks using free software and hardware technologies and “Do It Yourself” (DIY) and “Do It With Others”(DIWO) methods. Medialab-Prado offers free lodging for collaborators in a Youth Hostel during the workshop (limited places).

More information and submission form:
http://medialab-prado.es/article/interactivos10_ciencia_de_barrio_convocatoria_de_colaboradores

Selected projects:
http://medialab-prado.es/article/interactivos10

http://sspnet.eu/2010/03/mssp/

Lisbon – September 7th, 2010
In conjunction with Mobile HCI 2010

Mission
Given their status as a preeminent form of social interaction, mobile phone conversations have been the subject of relatively limited investigation, in terms of social behavior. This leaves open a major gap when two important developments take place. On one hand, Mobile HCI often deals with advanced mobile phones containing a large number of sensors (e.g., GPS, accelerometers, magnetometers, capacitive touch) and with sufficient processing power to capture with unprecedented richness behavior and context of users (e.g., position, movement, hand grip, proximity of social network members, gait type, auditory context). On the other hand, the computing community, in particular Social Signal Processing (SSP), makes significant efforts towards automatic understanding (via analysis of verbal and nonverbal behavior) of social interactions captured with multiple sensors.

This workshop bridges the above mentioned gap by gathering SSP and Mobile HCI researchers. Cross-pollination will identify research questions at the frontier between the two domains bringing significant novelty in both SSP and Mobile HCI.

Important Dates
Full paper submission: May 30th, 2010
Notification of Acceptance: June 20th, 2010
Camera ready paper submission: June 30th, 2010
Workshop: September 7th, 2010

Workshop articles will be published in a volume of the Springer LNCS series and participants are
expected to submit six to eight pages long papers in LNCS/LNAI format.

Topics
Workshop topics include (but are not limited to):
• Conversational behavior analysis
• Social Location and Context – measurement, analysis and use
• SSP in design of mobile interactions
• SSP in mobile entertainment and wellbeing
• Databases and SSP based content retrieval
• Cognitive modeling, automatic understanding, and synthesis of social phenomena

General Chairs
Alessandro Vinciarelli (University of Glasgow/Idiap Research Institute)
Rod Murray-Smith (University of Glasgow)
Herve’ Bourlard (Idiap Research Institute/EPFL)

For more information, please visit the workshop website:
http://sspnet.eu/2010/03/mssp/

(via the mobile-society mailinglist)

See our event page for details.

* XML is a contemporary cultural practice specialized in Architecture, Research and Urbanism. XML is interested in developing architectures that both reflect and provoke contemporary ways of life. By understanding program organization as a key strategy within each project XML aims for establishing new relations between buildings and society, the projects of the office are fuelled by a reflection on the contemporary city as source of cultural production.

From its base in Amsterdam XML has been involved in worldwide cross-disciplinary projects with an emphasis on cultural analysis. The office has won several prizes and is led by two partners, Max Cohen de Lara and David Mulder.

* Space&matter is an Amsterdam based architecture and planning office with an ambition to add relevance to spatial design.

As architecture and planning touch on all social and cultural levels of society, we think our responsibility embodies more than the mere design of space. With an open mind we look beyond the conventional scope of our discipline to find and create cross-links between physical space and sociocultural processes. Not the design itself but its effect on these processes is our main objective.

For more info, see the Keynote Speakers page >>

The MIT Senseable City Lab is a research group that explores the “real-time city” by studying the increasing deployment of sensors and networked hand-held electronics, as well as their relationship to the built environment. Its mission is to creatively intervene and investigate the interface between people, technologies and the city.

Anne Nigten is the director of The Patchingzone, a praxis laboratory where Master, PhD students and professionals work together on meaningful creative content.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/themobilecity/

Thank you!