Workshops on the Design of Urban Spaces and their Services

A couple of recent workshops on the design of urban spaces and the products and services that will populate them in the near future:

Urban Life and Urban Space Qualities – New Knowledge, Methods and Knowledge Needs

The interest in the urban space and life has become stronger in the last few years. The extent of events in the streets and open spaces of the cities is increasing. The acknowledgement of the importance of good urban spaces has improved, and the number of urban spaces projects is huge. But who actually uses the urban spaces, which urban spaces are used? And how do they use them? What characterizes the good urban space? And how and by who is it evaluated? How is a better co-operation between urban space researchers, decision makers and users established? Is it the right urban spaces which receive investments? How can research optimize the basis for decisions?

Informing the design of the future urban landscape

The workshop will seek to address questions such as: What form will the information landscape take? How will people adapt their behaviours and indeed how will the nature of the urban landscape alter as increased amounts of information is overlaid on the physical environment? What new products and services will be available given the increase of targeted information aimed at specific communities and interest groups? Will this result in an increase in segmentation and fragmentation associated with the urban experience leading to the possibility of the creation of multiple experiences of the same physical space. What will inform the visual aesthetic of the future information landscape?

Street Computing workshop at OZCHI 2009

The increasing availability of an urban computing infrastructure has lead to new and exciting ways inhabitants can interact with their city. This includes interaction with a wide range of services (e.g. public transport, public services), conceptual representations of the city (e.g. local weather and traffic conditions), the availability of a variety of shared and personal displays (e.g. public, ambient, mobile) and the use of different interaction modes (e.g. tangible, gesture-based, token-based).

This workshop solicits papers that address the above themes in some way. We encourage researchers to submit work that deals with challenges and possibilities that the availability of urban computing infrastructure such as sensors and middleware for sensor networks pose. This includes new and innovative ways of interacting with and within urban environments; user experience design and participatory design approaches for urban environments; social aspects of urban computing; and other related areas.

Why do I blog this: Emerging events that, from different domains, discuss 1. importance of good urban services and spaces (what is a good urban environment) 2. who evaluates then and 3. what is the overall design process (participatory approach)?