Project R-4312

Streetware: Urban Computing Interfaces to Enhance Citizen Engagement (Research)

As our urban environment is hosting an increasing number of isolated interactions between people through their individual mobile devices, the emergence of the city's identity through the movements and interactions of its inhabitants becomes severely affected. At the same time, the latest developments in networking and sensing technologies offer the opportunity for new forms of physical interfaces that facilitate interactions between people, or between people and places, within the confounds of places. Recent developments such as "printed" electronics allow for transforming everyday physical surfaces into multi-purpose interactive surfaces. New opportunities arise to exploit such technology in turning common people from passive "consumers" to active "citizens" that feel empowered to actively change the environment they inhabit. Our aim is therefore to investigate how the existing urban environment can be transformed into an interactive, yet intuitively readable and navigable environment that offers a wide range of civic functionalities to its inhabitants. We will determine the required properties for urban interfaces and build tools that empower local citizens in extending or augmenting existing urban infrastructure. We will conduct our further investigations 'in-the-wild', as we plan to intervene within the challenging context of the existing, real-world urban environment to determine the feasibility of offering open, situated services in the urban street.

01 January 2013 - 31 December 2016