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Today's Document
Claire Keane
Jules of Nature
oozey mess
RMH
tumblr dot com
occasionally subtle
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Game of Thrones Daily
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shark vs the universe
Kaledo Art
ojovivo
$LAYYYTER
★
Cosmic Funnies
Sade Olutola
KIROKAZE
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@reflexivedesign-sm
URBAN API PROJECT
WasteTracker is a mobile app which enables the user to explore the city with a focus on grocery store waste.
As the user navigates his city, he would get a chance to study data of waste produced by local grocery stores.
By showing data on grocery store waste with a real-time, location-based approach, WasteTracker seeks to raise the awareness on waste as a daily problem that happens all around us, especially in an urban setting.
The download link for the project presentation.
This document illustrates the whole process behind the final project, from the research approach to the mobile app testing in Plymouth city centre.
Data visualization
My research process started out with the visualization of electromagnetic fields as an interesting starting point when it comes to design a new way to visualize data flows. Secondly, I switched for different solutions, more materials and located in the urban setting.
This visualization by Michael Kneupfel shows which keys on a keyboard are used most often.
Jose Duarte makes graphs using balloons, painted dowels, string, and tape. He designed a toolkit with all these items, and gave them away for free until he was overwhelmed with requests.
This visualization by Peter Orntoft illustrates percents of people who are very afraid, somewhat afraid, or not afraid to stroll through this neighborhood due to gang violence.
Brendan Dawes created these objects using the data from his Twitter archive. The teal coloured cubes illustrate his Twitter activity from 2008, 2010 and 2012.
US Wind Map shows all present wind speeds and directions in the U.S. in real time. It's a great example of intuitive design: Speed is represented by lines moving slowly or quickly, and direction is represented by which way the lines are moving.
Carbon Footprint Animation - Plymouth University
Unconventional ways to visualize data in the physical space, a creative solution to involve people throughout the city and increase awareness around different topics. All these projects hope to inspire to see the world through a new lens, where everything and anything can be a creative starting point for play and expression.
I think this could be used in our project as part of the launch of the app or for a specific event about food waste, maybe hacking plastic bins in a particular area of the city or placing them in front of the groceries like a labyrinth in order to physically show the food waste impact.
Festivals & Data
Does data make sense at a festival? Well, yes.
A festival is the perfect microcosm of a complex modern city, it generates immense amounts of data generated from geospatial, social media and a multitude of other sources.
An event like a festival can be considered as an "anthropological place", opposed to the concept of non-place, a word coined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé to refer to anthropological spaces of transience where the human beings remain anonymous. The place, instead, offers people a space that empowers their identity, where they can meet other people with whom they share social references.
Case study: Roskilde Festival
Copenhagen Business School recognized that the local Roskilde Festival could act as a controlled environment for research into major issues affecting urban populations. The school partnered with IBM (focused on AI and machine learning) and the festival to give festival-goers the best experience possible using real-time analytics.
At the top level, the project intends to look at topics such as:
The movement of crowds throughout the event
The sales of food and beverages over time
The popularity of different musical events
Data in motion: Information took shape: The sale of food and average over time, the popularity of the various artists, the usage of bathroom facilities and parking, and so on created a comprehensive view of what was happening at the festival. One of the ways that they are using data is determining which artists to book next year, by tracking how many people went to an artist’s performance and how many stayed following the previous act by putting sensors at entrances to tents.
Real-time, operational decisions: By making this wealth of data accessible to non-data scientists, the Festival gained insights enabling better operational decisions that will minimize food waste, improve security, and optimize the festival experience.
The platform:
The process they used is quite similar to ours, they started by collecting data with .csv files and by using GPS tracking system, they then elaborated them through different platforms (we used Bluemix Services too during two of our workshops). Once the data were ready for a proper analysis they used different visualization services to show the final results.
We used GPS as a tracking system for our app but there are different modes of interaction and tracking, here is a creative approach for tracking people in an urban setting.
Lightswarm is an interactive installation at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California, and it uses sound sensors to trigger playful swarms of light. One night, the creators decided to hack their own artwork and experiment with some new methods of activation and visualization.
motion-based interaction proximity sensors track local movement
camera-tracking interaction machine vision detects people walking by
direct user interaction input through custom app on smart device
The Urban Interface
City Hack workshop
For this workshop we were asked to go out for half an hour and “hack” the city with some materials like nails, chalks, strings, etc… The Urban Interface is an exploration of the existing technologies in the city that are open for appropriating, hacking and playing with such as lights and other similar structures. Since it was daylight we couldn’t properly work with lights, we then decided to work with shadows of bollards by tracing their shape on the ground with a chalk, our idea was tracing the shape in time-lapse in order to generate a figure on the ground documenting the passing of time. Another idea that we came up with was to surround paddles with the same chalk, we thought it could be a nice way to frame the reflection of the surrounding to make people stop and appreciate the beauty of the nature. The last “hack” we did was by using a string to trace an hypothetical trajectory of the light of the lamp located near the Nancy Astor Sports Centre.
Nowadays the urban interface if becoming a living part of the city, a recent example is “8208 Lighting Design Festival” which I visited in 2017.
INNER VOICE Daniela di Maro - Porta Torre (Como, Italy)
This installation aims to generate a relationship between the inner and the outer of the city, using Porta Torre as a space-time "gap" and crossing the border between the inside and the outside of the city centre. Passers-by establish a relationship of cause and effect, animating the tower with sounds and colours. A few meters away from Porta Torre, there are microphones connected to colored directional lights, placed at the four internal corners. Passers-by, attracted by the presence of microphones, can approach and talk inside, leaving messages that depending on the intensity and frequency of the voices, cause ignitions and variations of colored light.
Virtual Reality Projects pt.2
Last week I attended a lecture by Professor Bob Stone from the Human Interface Technologies Team, School of Engineering at the University of Birmingham. Professor Stone himself, a 30-year 'veteran' of the VR and AR community, showed us the highs and lows of the worlds of VR and AR and how the technologies can be used in different ways apart from gaming. He then illustrated a range of real-world applications of VR, AR and Mixed Reality, from defence to healthcare, and from heritage to education.
Virtual Burrator and Virtual Wembury are just two examples of projects which involve the environment and challenge the city as complex cultural, political and social phenomenon.
Virtual Burrator has been developed by the Human Interface Technologies (HIT) Team at the University of Birmingham to evaluate the potential benefits of virtual outdoor environments in reducing patients' recovery times, particularly when it is not possible to expose those patients to real scenes of nature. They collected data with different devices such as High-Tech Drones, then they imported them into Unity for real-time visualisation.
Virtual Wembury is currently being used for experimental trials within the intensive care unit of Queen Elizabeth Hospital (Birmingham), the virtual reality programme has been designed to enable doctors and nurses here to use it alongside traditional rehabilitation techniques. The landscape can reflect both day and night scenes.
Although these projects don’t involve a GPS tracking system or the use of a real world terrain, I think that the user navigation is pretty similar to our initial thought and in both cases is done using Unity.
360° watercolour journey through Slough City Centre
Virtual Reality Projects pt.1
Last Saturday I went to the Art Book Fair at Royal William Yard, while passing by different exhibitors I noticed a cardboard visor which caught my attention so I asked to the lady behind it to tell me more about the project and the work in general.
Bring Your Own Future is an adventure in virtual reality. Working with the people of Slough, Close and Remote (Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter) have sloshed watercolour paints in a virtual reality Slough.
Through a series of action based sessions they have worked with a core group of Slough watercolour and VR enthusiasts to explore watercolour through virtual reality and virtual reality through watercolour, bringing about New Ways of Looking at Slough.
360° WATERCOLOUR JOURNEY
Close and Remote, working with the residents group, have used open source software, a-frame, to create a virtual reality 360° watercolour journey through Slough town centre, complete with atmospheric sound recorded at each location.
The journey can be viewed on your smartphone with or without a cardboard virtual reality viewer. It can also be viewed on your desktop, tablet or using HTC Vive VR headset. The journey features 360° watercolours by Close and Remote and a series of click-through watercolour ‘buttons’ by members of the group.
City Audio Workshop w/ John Matthias
For this workshop we were asked to go out in Plymouth and ask people to tell us a short story in order to create something by collecting different of them, it was not easy to get lot of stories as most often people deflected the question. We went to Drake Circus where people seemed to be more keen on answering our questions, then, I tried to combine the records with Audacity rearranging them to create another story by linking together some interesting parts of their narrations.
Sounds are a huge part of the urban experience, let’s think about the rumbling and honking of traffic, the chatter of pedestrians, and the sounds of street musicians are just a few of the aural experiences we associate with cities. As designers we should keep in mind all these factors which are an incredible source of inspiration for different projects regarding an urban setting.
A project called Chatty Maps renders street sounds in major global cities visible, block by block, showing the percentage of sounds that came from different categories of sources.
Smart cities
How Dutch cities are improving everyday life using data
What would happen if everyday citizens were empowered by technology to understand urban enviromental and make the city they love an even better place to live in the future?
Amsterdam Smart Citizens Lab Towards community driven data collection. “What are the levels of air pollution around your home or business? And what about noise pollution? And air humidity? Imagine that you would have this information, and share it instantly and compare it with other places in your city, in real time. We have tested this idea with the Smart Citizen Kit in Amsterdam.” The low-cost sensors in the kit, developed at Fab Lab Barcelona, measure two toxic gasses in the air (CO and NO2), the temperature & humidity, the light intensity and noise levels. The kit exists of an open source hardware device, a website where the data is being collected, an API and a mobile app.By giving individuals the tools to conduct research themselves, an increased involvement in the immediate environment might be the effect. This can create new, dynamic relationships between citizens, scientists and policy makers. And urban issues can be proposed, argued and substantiated from different perspectives.
Eindhoven & Utrecht In these two cities smart tech is part of everyday life and it helps to tackle traffic, noise and crime. Traffic sensors pick up your phone’s wifi signal even if you are not connected to the wifi network, by collecting data the city council can get information about the use of routes and preferred spots. Investing on smart technologies has helped the municipality to build intelligent infrastructures and buildings in particular places of the city to be more efficient. On the other hand we should consider the aspect of treating private data and privacy policies, as Peter van de Crommert says “We get that comment a lot – ‘Big brother is watching you’. I prefer to say, ‘Big brother is helping you’”. Companies are getting away with it in part because it involves new applications of data. In Silicon Valley, they call it “permissionless innovation”, they believe technological progress should not be stifled by public regulations. For the same reason, they can be secretive about what data is collected in a public space and what it is used for. Other council documents mention the prediction of school drop-outs, the prediction of poverty and the monitoring of “the health of certain groups” with the aim of “intervening faster”. But they do not realise that at the same time a lot of data is collected, and do not always make agreements about the ownership of data.
Urban mobility data
In 2017 Moovit, one of the most famous public transport app and biggest repository of transport data and analysis in the world, introduced an innovative comprehensive tool set to help cities and transport agencies shape the future of urban mobility.
Moovit announced the availability of its data to cities worldwide in a new suite of tools that empower decision makers with accurate, real-time public transport data.
Moovit’s Smart Transit Suite includes a set of game-changing features that provide cities, organisations and governments access to an unprecedented amount of data available on public transport in cities worldwide. With access to this data and analysis, organisations can better manage their cities, from planning construction projects to managing current transport issues. Providing a valuable data resource to communities that has until today been previously unavailable will help to accurately shape the future of urban mobility.
Moovit’s game-changing tools for cities include:
Moovit Urban Mobility Analytics
Transit Surveys
Transit Data Studio
Real time bus locator
Trip Planner API
Geofencing
A geo-fence is a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area, it’s used by GPS technology on mobile devices to locate them in a particular geographic area. These coordinates can be traced thanks to the signal received through the satellite from a mobile device.
The geofencing technique can be used with a location-aware device of a location-based service user entering or exiting a geo-fence. This activity could trigger an alert to the device's user as well as messaging to the geo-fence operator.
Geofencing is especially used for surveillance but also in advertising to engage potential customers located nearby a shop by sending push notifications (proximity marketing).
Here are two interesting examples of geofencing:
NAO-Campus
It’s an indoor technology developed by Pole Star which allows to obtain the geographic coordinates inside buildings with a 3D visualisation from a mobile terminal. Firefighters in Chongqing (China) use this technology to ensure the safety of their operators in buildings at risk.
A customized, optimized interactive experience with interactive mapping.
“Integrating an interactive 2D or 3D map into a mobile application allows your visitors to access location and tracking (“where am I”), turn-by-turn guidance and navigation, and intelligent, interactive route planning. With its indoor geolocation service, Pole Star delivers several mapping SDKs which make it possible to import the mapping on the NAO Cloud platform, and to easily integrate it into the mobile application with all of the associated functions (points of interest, route planning, etc.)”
iBeacon
It’s a protocol developed by Apple and introduced in 2013, various vendors have since made iBeacon-compatible hardware transmitters (beacons), a class of Bluetooth low energy devices that broadcast their identifier to nearby portable electronic devices. The technology enables smartphones, tablets and other devices to perform actions when in close proximity to an iBeacon. The identifier and several bytes sent with it can be used to determine the device's physical location, track customers, or trigger a location-based action on the device such as a check-in on social media or a push notification.
Location-based ads
Networked Markets
Location-based advertising is becoming more and more popular these days since almost everyone carries a smartphone wherever we go and most of us use to share our locations data with the various apps we use. Advertisers collect these data in order to personalise in real time their messages to people based on their current location in order to get more engagement.
It’s like Amazon's recommendation but it’s in real time and in real life, it often happens when you walk down the street and some apps suggest you their nearest store or offer, since it’s a real time collection of data, changing attitudes influence ad as well.
Finding out what people are interested in and then personalising the message is a much more sensible approach and location data technology enables you to do that.
