Participatory Urbanism: Empowering Everyday Civic Engagement

February 14, 2007
Our mobile devices are more than just personal communication tools. They are globally networked, speak the lingua franca of the city (SMS, Bluetooth, MMS), and are becoming the dominant urban processor. We need to shatter our understanding of them as phones and celebrate them in their new role as measurement instruments. Our desire is to provide our mobile devices with new "super-senses" and abilities by enabling a wide range of physical sensors to be easily attached and used by anyone, especially non-experts. This talk will present earlier foundation work in the field of Urban Computing and address an important new shift in mobile device usage'from communication tool to "networked mobile personal measurement instrument". We explore how these new "instruments" enable entirely new participatory urban lifestyles and create novel mobile device usage models.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• CITRIS
• UCBerkeley
• Research
• Technology
• Engineering
• Science