Urban Futures: A Performance based Approach to Residential Design

Urban planning plays a key role in shaping and forming the physical and digital city environments we inhabit, and the transition spaces in between. Facing increasing population pressures and environmental issues, new opportunities offered by ubiquitous computing, mobile technology and urban informatics need to be grasped to futureproof urban planning practices. New approaches that take advantage of real-time information, sensor networks and qualitative data may prove to be essential additions to tried and true methods in order to renew urban planning's high standing in envisioning society's future habitat. This presentation reports on ongoing research work that aims to overcome some limitations of conventional community engagement strategies in the context of urban planning. Adaptive and human-centred design approaches that are well-established in human-computer interaction (such as, personas and design scenarios) as well as creative writing and drama methods (such as, Stanislavskian character development techniques and Meisner's exercises for character development), are yet largely unexplored in the rather conservative and long-term design context of urban planning. Based on these approaches, we have been trialling a set of performance based workshop activities to gain insights into participants' desires and requirements that may inform the future design of smaller than average apartments and apartment buildings in inner-city Brisbane, Australia. The focus of these workshops is to analyse the behaviour and lifestyle of apartment dwellers and generate residential personas that become boundary objects in the cross-disciplinary discussions of urban design and planning teams. Dramatisation and embodied interaction of use cases form part of the strategies we employ to engage participants and elicit community feedback.

RSVP by 29/05/2009 at:
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Map and Directions:
http://www.city.ac.uk/maps/buildings/college.html

Dr Marcus Foth is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia. He is the team leader of the Urban Informatics research group. He received a BCompSc(Hon) from Furtwangen University, Germany, a BMultimedia from Griffith University, Australia and an MA and PhD in digital media and urban sociology from QUT. Dr Foth was the recipient of an Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship supported under the Australian Research Council's Discovery funding scheme. He was a 2007 Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK. Employing participatory design and action research, he is working on cross-disciplinary research and development at the intersection of people, place and technology with a focus on urban informatics, locative media and mobile applications. Dr Foth has published over sixty articles in journals, edited books, and conference proceedings in the last five years. He is the editor of the Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics (2009). He is the conference chair of OZCHI 2009, a member of the Australian Computer Society and the Executive Committee of the Association of Internet Researchers.

http://www.urbaninformatics.net/