Participatory Urbanism: Empowering Everyday Civic Engagement and Designing for Wonderment

Speaker
Eric Paulos
Senior Research Scientist, Intel Research Berkeley

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

There is more to our urban lives than precision location systems, restaurant recommendations, and familiar desktop applications redeployed on mobile phones. While many of these tools will indeed become vital urban necessities that improve our lives, we are left to wonder the role of technology in touching the other more emotional aspects of urban living. In concert with our urban productivity tools, we envision the existence of a wider range of new urban objects that broaden our expectations of technology and promote our personal and collective wonderment of place, people, and life. Our claim is that the future technologies we will desire to share our lives with will be those that incorporate the full range of urban experiences—from improving productivity and efficiency to promoting wonderment and curiosity. This talk will present a series of research strategies, urban interventions, and studies of functional artifacts to open a discussion around this issue of designing for wonderment.

The talk will dive more deeply into an important new shift in mobile phone usage—from communication tool to “networked mobile personal measurement instrument”. We will explore how these new “personal instruments” enable a novel and empowering genre of mobile computing usage called citizen science. We investigate how such citizen science can be used collectively across neighborhoods and communities to enable individuals to become active participants and stakeholders as they publicly collect, share, and remix measurements of their city that matter most. We further demonstrate the impact of this new participatory urbanism by detailing its usage within the scope of environmental awareness. Inspired by a series of field studies, user driven environmental measurements, and interviews, we present the design of a system that integrates air quality sensing into an existing mobile phone and exposes the citizen authored measurements to the community—empowering people to become true change agents.

Speaker's Bio

Eric Paulos is a Senior Research Scientist at Intel in Berkeley, California where he is the founder and director of the Urban Atmospheres research group - challenged to employ innovative methods to explore urban life and the future fabric of emerging technologies across public urban landscapes. His areas of expertise span a deep body of research territory in urban computing, sustainability, green design, environmental awareness, social telepresence, robotics, physical computing, interaction design, persuasive technologies, and intimate media. Eric is a leading figure in the field of urban computing and is a regular contributor, editorial board member, and reviewer for numerous professional journals and conferences. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley where he helped launch a new robotic industry by developing some of the first internet tele-operated social robots including Space Browsing helium filled blimps and Personal Roving Presence devices (PRoPs). Eric is also the founder and director of the Experimental Interaction Unit and a frequent collaborator with Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories. Eric’s work has been exhibited at the InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Japan, Ars Electronica, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, the Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF), SFMOMA, the Chelsea Art Museum, Southern Exposure, Art Interactive, LA MOCA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the ZKM, and a performance for the opening of the Whitney Museum’s 1997 Biennial Exhibition.

Host
Anind Dey