UbiCity06

From REMAP

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Ubicomp and the City 2006

Workshop at Ubicomp 2006, the Eighth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Orange County, California.

How can ubicomp technologies be used to invigorate public space, enhance community life and enable people to see their city in new ways?
Can we go beyond incremental improvements to wayfinding and apply ubicomp technologies to explore the rhythms, geography, communities and history of our cities?
How should civic responsibility impact the design of such technologies for deployment in urban public spaces?
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Call for Position Papers

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Summary

This workshop explores ubicomp technologies and design approaches for civic, community and cultural applications on an urban scale.

"...I refer, of course, to those programs, unique in our time, which are complex because of their scope, such as research laboratories, hospitals, and particularly the enormous projects at the scale of city and regional planning… This contrast between the means and the goals of a program is significant. Although the means involved in the program of a rocket to get to the moon, for instance, are almost infinitely complex, the goal is simple and contains few contradictions; although the means involved in the program and structure of buildings are far simpler and less sophisticated technologically than almost any engineering project, the purpose is more complex and often inherently ambiguous." - Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

We invite position papers that use specific cities - with all of their complexities and contradictions - as case studies. Authors should focus on mobile communications, wireless sensor technology and other components of ubicomp as key enabling platforms for new experiences in that city. They should take a position with respect to the unique civic responsibilities that might come with ubicomp technologies created for and deployed in public space.

To explore this broad topic in the limited length allowed (3-5 pages), each paper should select one of three focus areas as a starting point:

  1. Driver application – A specific, deployable application, for the driver city, described from the point of view of end-user experience.
  2. Platforms / services – A set of enabling platforms or services that would catalyze experimentation in the driver city with ubicomp technologies.
  3. Infrastructure – Concepts for urban infrastructure in the driver city, which can span all definitions of infrastructure - e.g., networking and telecommunications but also teaching/training, deployed testbeds, etc.

Authors are encouraged to construct a progression from their own first-person understanding of a city they know well to a careful look at its history and current cultural landscape, moving into a provocative and well-reasoned ubicomp application or platform that incorporates the specific nature of their ‘driver’ city. Papers are encouraged to focus on provocative, tractable ideas for specific areas and communities rather than vague visions that would fit any metropolis.

Multidisciplinary papers crossing computer science, electrical engineering, the humanities, arts and social sciences are strongly encouraged.

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Third Things, Third Places

For this workshop, authors should focus on areas outside of traditional ubicomp applications in productivity and entertainment. Though urban spaces are a central arena for work and leisure, this workshop will consider arts, culture, informal activity and civic participation - a rich third class of applications where traditional task-oriented design is insufficient. Civic engagement, creative expression, family and community life, the cultural contribution of art, science and engineering: these are for what and for whom we maximize our time. In them, efficiency is neither the right metric nor a primary design goal. They relate deeply to our physical context (especially location); they are community-specific; they require new design approaches to be explored here.

This third area of applications is loosely joined with Ray Oldenburg's ideas on the importance of third places - that informal public gathering places are vital parts of community life. See The Great Good Place (Oldenburg, 1991), or the Project for Public Spaces website.

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Workshop organization

The workshop will be broken into three sections:

  • Morning: Paper presentations and discussion.
  • Late morning / lunch: Selection of one or two synthesizing case study ideas, with identification or core technical and social issues for each.
  • Afternoon: Breakout sessions that use these case studies to develop design approaches and research agenda for the three areas of submission: (a) applications (b) city infrastructure, (c) platforms/services.

During the afternoon, participants will be asked to focus further on the relationships among existing social networking technologies and the ubiquitous mobile devices and wireless sensor networks considered in the papers. Finally, the group will consider how ubiquitous urban sensing and mobile technology can positively impact quality of life in cities unless they are also explicitly designed for civic and cultural applications as well as personal ones.

The workshop proceedings will be distributed to the participants, and made available online.

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Participant Selection

As many as 8 papers will be selected on the basis of quality, originality, geographic and cultural distribution of 'driver' cities, and to ensure a group of participants with a diverse group of backgrounds and perspectives.

Retrieved from "http://bigriver.remap.ucla.edu/remap/index.php/UbiCity06"