The SenCity Workshop @ Ubicomp 2013

By Sarah Gallacher

http://www.sencity.co.uk/

The SenCity workshop took place on Monday 9^th September 2013 at Ubicomp in Zurich Switzerland.  Over 20 participants arrived on the day, bringing their own skills and interests.  They included designers, social scientists, technologists and sensor experts to name a few.  The aim of the workshop was to explore the use of sensing technologies for visually resurfacing some of the hidden dynamics of the city by providing a collaborative and facilitated environment for applied research and creative exploration.  The participants were split into groups and two sensing kits were provided to groups.  The first kit was the Smart Citizen environmental sensor kit and the second was the custom built SenCity kit built by Vaiva Kalnikaite.

Groups were given time to brainstorm what they wanted to sense in the city, how they were going to do it, where they were going to do it and what the sensor kit should look like in the city environment.  Various materials were provided to build sensor kit casings.  The groups showed great creativity and the final results ranged from typical “black-box” style casings to duck shapes and even an alien!  The groups then left the workshop room to explore Zurich for several hours and try out their creations.  On their return the collected data was plugged into a visualisation platform, developed by Hans-Christian Jetter, and each group presented a story of their day including their ideas, final sensor casing design and their data story of where they went in Zurich, what they sensed and what the visualisations represented.

It was interesting to note how several groups created animal or human-like sensor casings that were aimed at encouraging public participation.  Indeed, those groups experienced positive curiosity from the public whereas other groups with more “black-box” like designs commented on the negative suspicion of members of the public.  Another interesting behaviour was the expectation of a reward by some members of the public who had interacted with one of the sensor kits.

These outcomes along with the collected data and other experiences from the workshop are central to our on-going research agenda investigating the challenges of citizen sensing in urban environments.  We wish to develop technologies and tools to empower the citizens of urban spaces through sensing and sense making in a bottom-up fashion.  Interesting questions arise as to how to encourage participation especially in the long-term and what the benefits are to the citizens who participate?  As the trends of big data and “smart infrastructure” continue we want to give city inhabitants the means and opportunities to impact and drive change.

Pictures by Danny Harrison (http://www.flickr.com/photos/dbpharrison/)

On October 22-23^rd, Intel  will explore this and other questions pertaining to the challenges facing future cities as paty of its 2013  European Research and Innovation Conference (ERIC), which will hosted together with the annual Research at Intel Europe (R@IE) showcase in Nice, France, close to the home to Intel’s High Performance Computing and Wireless Labs.

The theme of this year’s conference is “Building a Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive society through Research and Innovation partnership” and there will be a number of distinct focus areas included within the event: Networking, Mobility, HPC Exascale, Connected Cities and System on Chip (SoC) Architecture.

For the third year running, David Prendergast, an ICRI Cities Principal Investigator is responsible for organising the Connected Cities and Communities track in the conference. The theme for 2013 is “City Life” and speakers have been asked to provide insights around how we synthesise scalable city platforms with local community needs, practices and aspirations.  What lessons can we learn from the recipes that have worked over time?

Selected partners from the Intel research ecosystem, including Academic and Intel Researchers as well as leading thinkers and practitioners in the area of future cities are invited to speak in order to bring together a potent mixture of perspectives, approaches and challenging discussions. Speakers and delegates have ample opportunities to network with experts across academia, industry & government organizations as well as press and analysts from around the world.

Attendance is by invitation only and whilst places are very limited, ICRI Cities has access to a small number of spaces that it can make available to potential delegates. Readers are welcome to register their interest by contacting david.k.prendergast@intel.com.

Vaiva Kalnikaite and Sarah Gallacher, both from ICRI-Cities at UCL in London will jointly present their work on gathering and representing community data using novel input and visualisation mediums.  The presentation will include details of two in the wild studies that were conducted at two scales within a city environment – 1) in a “dead” workplace building and 2) in a “divided” community.  The first study looks at how lightweight and playful technology interventions can encourage greater levels of social connectedness within a “dead” workplace environment where physical interactions and a sense of community are typically low.  The second study looks at how a technology intervention has been used to challenge the strongly held belief of a social divide in an urban community.

Conference Schedule

Day 1 – Tuesday 22 October

Day 2 – Wednesday 23^rd October