This chapter explores the use of “responsive” or “interactive” urban media technologies as a tool or “building block” in the (re)design of urban public spaces. This is especially relevant as in the last two decades, urban development and digital technologies have brought out new types of urban typologies and practices often referred to as “networked urbanism.” These typologies and practices bring out specific challenges with regard to their functioning as public space. We argue that responsive technologies could reinforce qualities of public space in this condition of “networked urbanism”; however, their implementation demands new strategies and above all new forms of cooperation between disciplines such as architecture, urban design, and urban interaction design. To aid such an approach, this chapter introduces a heuristic of five mechanisms of responsive media. These are meant to function as a shared vocabulary aiding designers of various backgrounds to collaborate in an interdisciplinary design process for public spaces in a broader development of networked urbanism.
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Responsive public spaces use interactive technologies to adapt to users and situations. This enhances the quality of the space as a public realm. However, the application of responsive technologies in spatial design is still to be explored. What exactly are the options for incorporating responsive technologies in spatial designs to improve the quality of public spaces? The book Responsive Public Spaces explores and disentangles this new assignment for designers, and presents inspiring examples. A consortium of spatial designers, interaction designers and local stakeholders, headed by the Chair of Spatial Urban Transformation of Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, carried out a two-year practice-based study of responsive public spaces. This book draws on those insights to provide a practical approach and a roadmap for the new design process for responsive public spaces.The study results are of signi¬icance for various professional fields. The book is intended for clients and stakeholders involved in planning and design of public spaces, spatial designers, interaction designers and students.
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The Covid-19 pandemic triggered governments and designers to revalue and redesign public spaces. This paper focuses on the various design responses to Covid-19 proposed and implemented in public spaces. In particular, we identify the kinds of challenges that such design responses address and the strategies that they use. We selected 56 design examples, largely collected from internet sources. By analyzing the design examples we identified five Covid-related challenges that were addressed in public space: sustaining amenities, keeping a distance, feeling connected, staying mentally healthy, and expanding health infrastructures. For each challenge, we articulated 2 to 6 design strategies. The challenges highlight the potential of public space to contribute to more resilient cities during times of pandemic, also in the future. The design strategies show the possible ways in which this potential can be fulfilled. In our next steps, we will use our findings to develop a program of possibilities; this program will contain a wide range of design strategies for responding to future pandemics and will be made publically accessible in an online database. The program contributes to more resilient post-Covid cities, by offering a variety of possibilities for coping with, and adapting to, pandemic-related shocks and stressors.
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Can audience embarrassment be used to shape interactions in public settings? Is this the threshold for an audience to step in and / or out of the interaction in performative interactions in public space? The proliferation of mobile and ubiquitous devices has shifted the attention to the design of interactive systems for use in public settings. This design applies the notion of performance to attract and engage audiences. Because performance becomes such a core part of the interaction, the success of those interactive systems heavily depends upon the physical, social and emotional context in which they are to be used. Indeed, strangers around a potential user may hinder or encourage that individual's participation in the interaction. Similarly, the physical space in which the interaction takes place, public or semipublic space may as well facilitate audience participation or prevent it. This paper investigates what characteristics of this setting (perceived / felt) can trigger audience participation in the interaction. A model based on the notion of performance and entailing some degree of felt embarrassment is applied to two cases to explain how the potential embarrassment implicit in any interaction in public space can be used to encourage users’ participation in it.
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PurposeThis paper aims to consider the relationship between urban events and urban public space, asking whether cities have enough space for events and whether events have enough space in cities.Design/methodology/approachPolicy analysis surrounding events and festivals in the Netherlands is used to understand the dynamics of urban events, supported by content analysis of policy documents. A vignette of event space struggles in Amsterdam illustrates the contradictions of the event/space relationship.FindingsThe research identifies a policy shift in the Netherlands towards urban events from expansive, festivalisation strategies to defensive, NIMBYist policies. It exposes contradictions between protecting space as a living resource and the exploitation of space for regenerative purposes. Three future scenarios for urban events are outlined: conflict and competition, growth and harmony and digitalisation and virtualisation.Practical implicationsDevelops scenarios for the future relationship between events and urban space.Originality/valueProvides an analysis of the recursive spatial implications of the growth of the events sector for cities and the growth of cities for events.
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Urban densification is promoted for sustainable urban growth, yet it also generates concerns about negative health impacts on local citizens. Engaging local citizens in the co-design of densification projects is therefore crucial to address their needs and concerns. The use of immersive Virtual Reality (VR) technologies creates potential for advancing the participatory co-design of healthier urban spaces by allowing citizens to not only visualize but also experience the impacts of future designs or “what-if” scenarios. Theoretically grounded in an extended version of Sheppard's approach, which we call the Experiencing the Future Framework (EFF), we developed a study to create and evaluate an immersive VR application called CoHeSIVE. This application was designed to facilitate participatory co-design processes for healthy public spaces. CoHeSIVE, as the technological manifestation of our framework, was created through iterative workshops with end-user input. During the final workshop with 41 participants, both qualitative and quantitative data were collected, including user behavior and experiences with CoHeSIVE, especially regarding its experiential and interactive components. The vast majority of participants had positive experiences and recommended CoHeSIVE for participatory co-design processes. Participants felt confident in their design outcomes and found the user interface easy to use and effective for making and communicating design decisions. The most preferred design attributes were found to be many and clustered trees, several benches, large grass areas, high-rise buildings, more lampposts and the presence of a fountain, showing that the design outcomes were meaningful for the selected local context. Future enhancements of CoHeSIVE might include adding more design attributes, enhancing visual representations, adding multi-user capabilities, integrating generative AI and expanding CoHeSIVE's applicability to other contexts.
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Aim of this presentation was to stress the utmost importance of gaining insight in the physical-spatial quality and context of the urban fabric as a whole before venturing out into the realm of transformation design proposals. Large-scale areas or confined objects alike, the quality of the urban frame is precondition to the socioeconomic efficacy of the programme in question and the role and position of public spaces such as squares, parks, (main) streets and urban axes.
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Public Play Space (PPS) is a project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and developed by IAAC, BUas, and CLAC. It promotes innovative and creative practices for the co-design of inclusive, cohesive, and sustainable public spaces, through the use of games and digital technologies, in a transnational and European perspective, fostering the process of placemaking.The objective of this PPS Wiki Community Platform is to create a knowledge community on the use of digital technologies and games to enhance participatory processes for urban design and placemaking, allowing a wider dissemination of the best practices in this field and to facilitate knowledge sharing and the interaction among key stakeholders.
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In this paper we explore the influence of the physical and social environment (the design space) son the formation of shared understanding in multidisciplinary design teams. We concentrate on the creative design meeting as a microenvironment for studying processes of design communication. Our applied research context entails the design of mixed physical–digital interactive systems supporting design meetings. Informed by theories of embodiment that have recently gained interest in cognitive science, we focus on the role of interactive “traces,” representational artifacts both created and used by participants as scaffolds for creating shared understanding. Our research through design approach resulted in two prototypes that form two concrete proposals of how the environment may scaffold shared understanding in design meetings. In several user studies we observed users working with our systems in natural contexts. Our analysis reveals how an ensemble of ongoing social as well as physical interactions, scaffolded by the interactive environment, grounds the formation of shared understanding in teams. We discuss implications for designing collaborative tools and for design communication theory in general.
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This document aims to capture some of the ongoing trends and everyday life challenges in public space observed in Dutch cities since the Covid-19 pandemic hit. We interviewed professionals from municipalities, research organizations, NGOs and design and architecture agencies in the Netherlands, each part of the community of practice connected to the project ‘From Prevention to Resilience’. In these interviews, partners reflected on the various responses that have sprung up during one year of Covid-19 and how these may inform efforts to design better futures for our cities.
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