Zoekresultaten

Round n around

Hacking the city

Martijn de Waal is a senior researcher at the lectorate of Play and Civic Media and a member of the Citizen Data Lab at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Hetis the author of The City as Interface. How Digital Media Are Changing the City (2014), and the project leader of The Hackable City research project. He is also the co-founder of TheMobileCity.nl an international think tank that since 2007 addressed the relation between digital media and urbanism. His most recent book, co-authored with José van Dijck and Thomas Poell – only available in Dutch – is The Platform Society. The Struggle for Public Value in an Onlie World (2016).

The Urban Belonging Photo App: A toolkit for studying place attachments with digital and participatory methods

This paper introduces the open-source Urban Belonging (UB) toolkit, designed to study place attachments through a combined digital, visual and participatory methodology that foregrounds lived experience. The core of the toolkit is the photovoice UB App, which prompts participants to document urban experiences as digital data by taking pictures of the city, annotating them, and reacting to others’ photos. The toolkit also includes an API interface and a set of scripts for converting data into visualizations and elicitation devices. The paper first describes how the app’s design specifications were co-created in a process that brought in voices from different research fields, planners from Gehl Architects, six marginalized communities, and citizen engagement professionals. Their inputs shaped decisions about what data collection the app makes possible, and how it mitigates issues of privacy and visual and spatial literacy to make the app as inclusive as possible. We document how design criteria were translated into app features, and we demonstrate how this opens new empirical opportunities for community engagement through examples of its use in the Urban Belonging project in Copenhagen. While the focus on photo capture animates participants to document experiences in a personal and situated way, metadata such as location and sentiment invites for quali-quantitative analysis of both macro trends and local contexts of people’s experiences. Further, the granularity of data makes both a demographic and post-demographic analysis possible, providing empirical ground for exploring what people have in common in what they photograph and where they walk. And, by inviting participants to react to others’ photos, the app offers a heterogeneous empirical ground, showing us how people see the city differently. We end the paper by discussing remaining challenges in the tool and provide a short guide for using it.

Framing students’ reflective interactions based on photos

Critical reflection, addressing students’ attitude, beliefs and values related to pressing topics in the world, plays a crucial role in developing ethical sensitiveness and critical design literacy in design education. Critical reflection is provoked by discussing self-made photos, as is demonstrated in the research method Photovoice. This paper considers Photovoice in design education for its ability to foster learning through self-guided critical reflective interactions with peers based on self-made photos. Research on how to support this is lacking. This paper addresses this gap by studying students engaging in self-guided Photovoice assignments. Results consist of adapted steps for Photovoice in education and illustrate potential as well as boundaries of self-guided Photovoice through students’ quotes and photomaps. Also, five frames of interpretation, suggested by students engaged in self-guided Photovoice, contribute to previous knowledge and may inspire the design education community to start experimenting with Photovoice in course work. The final aim is to support students in critical reflection, a crucial skill for responsible design professionals.

Designing for Self-awareness: Supporting Students’ Reflexive Interactions Based on Photos

Educators in professional higher education experience difficulties addressing students’ self-awareness in their courses. The topic is often dismissed by students as ‘vague’ or ‘irrelevant’. This is detrimental for learning since knowing who you are and who you want to be is crucial: it guides behaviour and helps to feel balanced and in control. Support is needed to trigger students’ self-awareness and to make this process less demanding. In this paper we present guidelines for interactive triggers supporting students in developing their self-awareness. We asked students to discuss self-made photos in small groups and offered them three paper prototypes of triggers to work with. Questionnaire results and analysis of students’ discussions resulted in insights on how these triggers provoke distinct interaction and support self-awareness. Insights in advantages and disadvantages of the triggers can be used to design and implement innovative interactive systems that engage students in the process of developing self-awareness.

PhotoReflexivity

This paper describes the development and results of the pedagogical photo-based method PhotoReflexivity. This method is designed to support reflexivity for students in design education, which guides them in better understanding and situating themselves in the outside world. To uncover the value of this method, mixed research methods including iterative prototypes were deployed in real-world learning scenarios with design students. Attitudes, behaviour, and reflexive conversations were analysed, from which design patterns and recommendations were derived. It is argued that PhotoReflexivity fills a gap in design education by aiming for extensive and transformational outcomes associated with reflexivity, which previous research has considered hard to achieve. It does so by providing pragmatic technologies and materials to support 1) sharing and collaboration, and 2) verbalising reflexive thoughts. By facilitating reflexivity, students might become more autonomous and responsible design professionals.