This is my first lesson at the Master UX held at La Sapienza University of Rome.
In this lesson we analyze how to use the service concept formalized in the User Journey to create a working prototype.
In the process we use all the information emerged from the User Investigation, Analysis and Information Architecture phase.
This is Part 1. Part 2 will follow in the next days.
the workshop participants
Just back from Trieste, where we held an intense workshop about the re-design of the city’s urban communication.
The workshop has spread out over a whole week.
The first day we met the city and regional institutions (with many thanks to the counselors Fabio Omero and Elena Marchigiani who were with us for the whole day filled with presentations and talks, and who also have been a pleasant, informing presence during the next days of the workshop), who presented us with the global scenario of the city of Trieste and its region: a city dedicated to wellness and better life, capable of uniting the beauty of its multi-cultural history (the nearby international border and its beautiful histories of permeability and cultural remix was ever present and a beautiful source of narratives and of peculiar points of view) to the wealth of traditions, of food, wines, nature and innovation.
Trieste was painted as a “city with no single center“, a city which does not benefit from a massive, single attraction which could be used as driver for turism and development (e.g.: a colosseum), but a city with hundreds of different centers, based on experiences and well-being, on the hundreds of cultural associations, citizen groups, on the beautiful seaside, on the parks, castles, belvedere and spots for relaxed socialization, ready to be reinvented to re-conceptualize the city’s tourism and daily life.
This analysis was supported by the regional counselors for Turism, who described a rapidly developing sector, but who also wished to highlight how the region had been focusing on a multiplicity of different turisms (from turism to turisms) which could combine the necessities of large operators (e.g.: large congresses and tour operators) to the ones of the hundreds of different niches, aiming at realizing experiences for non-conventional turists, for amateurs, lovers, sport freaks and more.
ex-opp
The next two days we were taken for a walking tour of the many paradoxes of the city of Trieste by the Manifetso2020 association, taking us from the ex-OPP, the old asylum which is now one of the possible objectives of a new era of city projects, with its beautiful spaces up the hills and unused buildings full of history, down to the old port, where
the Old Portteh ex Port
an incredible number of practically abandoned buildings, clear example of industrial archaeology, are ready to host events, projects, fairs, concerts, exhibits and shows.
All the while we have been able to experience the peculiarities of the city, such as the characteristic ways in which the go to the beach, along the coastal roads of the Barcola with the typical Topolini buildings.
the workshop space
Having explored the city and its peculiarities, we set forth to confront with our task: the re-design of Trieste’s urban communication.
To do this, we followed a co-creative approach, in which many stages of expression merged into shared, collaborative sessions during which the overall project emerged.
Our high-level objective:
How do you use a city without a center?
How is it possible to optimize, promote, develop, engineer or architect, in formal, manageable ways, a place with so many interpretations and with an identity which is disseminated among people, groups, associations, organizations, places and times?
Who are the city’s dwellers?
What do they desire? What do they want to do? Which experiences do they want to live?
How do they search and find the services they need to satisfy their day-to-day needs?
Where and how do they want to act?
Who do they want to meet?
How are their conversations made? How are their relations structured?
Which experiences do they dream about? Which ones do they not yet know they want?
Which information do they need when they are far?
Which ones while they are arriving in Trieste?
Which ones when they arrive?
Which information do they need when they stop in the city for one minute, one hour, one day, one month of for the rest of their life, for tourism, life, work, family, desire, emotions, passions, or science?
How can you navigate the city from the middle of a white square, or from a desert park atop the city, or from the walls of a castle, or from the spaces of an enormous grey building, or from the sidewalk at the port, or from a large avenue which traverses buildings of industrial archeology?
How is the navigation system of the city made? How can it make information readable, visible and accessible?
How can you transform Trieste into a semantic city?
How is the Information Architecture of the city of Trieste made?
This was probably the most relevant diagram we used during the workshop.
data, information, knowledge,wisdom
The idea of bringing it to life by designing a novel system of urban communication and information has proven to be a challenging task.
Most urban signage do not go beyond the level of information: they assemble data about locations, opening times, types of venues etc to create signs which show useful information in the most readable, accessible way.
What we imagined for the city of Trieste was quite different.
We imagined using the opportunities offered by technologies and networks to go beyond information and to achieve knowledge and wisdom.
For example, city signage could be the portal for emergent publishing processes which would benefit from the constant production of content and commentaries by citizens and tourists on social networks: dedicated systems could be used to find patterns in people’s expressions and behaviors, thus producing usable knowledge which could be made accessible there, from the sign.
Obviously, technologies would be required to access these kinds of signs, too. And, thus, specific focus was dedicated to the issues of Digital Divide and Digital Inclusion, imagining ways in which people who did not own devices such as smartphones or did not know how to use them, could benefit from the same functionalities.
What we aimed for was a complete navigation system for the city.
navigation systems (orielly)
The idea was also to use signage to enact the semantic city, in which the semantic relationships between venues, services, events and opportunities would be visible, readable and accessible.
Trieste is: the place for opportunity; of indetermination and, thus, possibility; of the small, comfortable, diffused; relational, colloquial; precise and complex; planned, functional and organized; the place of boundaries and of their permeability; of free contamination and of locked drawers.
According to these interpretations, Trieste is a natural platform for human expression, just like the Network.
The Network is not a Technology, but a place for expression, for relation, for communication and possibility.
It’s a place where no spectators exist: in the Network everyone is a performer.
Choosing, connecting, looking, conversing, recognizing and interacting: everything in the Network becomes construction.
Anything we do becomes a creation of maps of relations, tastes, meanings, affinities.
From consumers to cultural producers, disseminated in time and space, and connected by transforming links, multiple and emergent.
The Network has defined its models to deal with this expressive and creative modality.
The model of the Long Tail, defined in 2004 by Chris Anderson, has been able to effectively describe the economic life of this reality.
Here, a high frequency and amplitude population is followed by a low frequency/amplitude one.
Using the Amazon.com website as a typical example, the market is composed by a distribution of agents in which few publications selling millions of copies sit side-by-side with millions of other publications selling only a few (or even one) of them.
Far from classical business models, mainly dedicated to promoting few best-seller products and to the substantial exclusion of niches, the Long Tail is a polyphonic marketplace, which is able to valorize (and monetize) in extreme ways the productions of the smaller operators and to engage cultural niches.
Operators such as Amazon.com get as much as 60% of their profits from the possibility to simultaneously access hundreds of thousands of niche markets.
In this scenario operators become platforms for expression used by small actors, cultural producers, re-combiners, remixers, micro-curators of niche markets, fetishes and specialities, to diffuse and distribute their own vision.
The Long Tail is an ecosystem in its fullest definition: every actor contributes to the balance and well-being of the environment, performing its life-style and relations.
How is a Long Tail City made?
We offered a vision of the city of Trieste as a City-Platform, able to offering spaces, times, functionalities and opportunities to all the actors of the Long Tail – for tourism and citizenship–.
A city which is able to promote both the strategies and policies of large operators, and the ones of niche operators who, from within the city and from the diffusion of the Network, can invent, design, develop, communicate, offer and manage their product and services, referring to the passions, desires, visions, relations and imaginaries of their natural audiences.
A City Platform which can offer tools to operators of any size, and to transform people in performers: tourist performers; citizen performers; consumer performers; desiring and willing to live the experiences of the city and to give back their emotions, comments, rankings, orientations, suggestions, relations.
A City Platform in which data and information, brought into the ecosystem by private and public operators as well as by citizens and tourists, interweave producing knowledge and wisdom.
A City Platform in which recombining the city resources all actors of the Long Tail can express themselves: from large operators and the possibility to create supply chains and organization; to niche operators and the possibility to interconnect the resources of the city to express themselves and create fluxus and convergence.
the ecosystem
Operators are able to publish all of their initiatives into the ecosystem: every published element – hotels, initiatives, events, restaurants… – is associated to a series of information and meta-data, allowing for its classification into the Information Architecture of the city.
Operators can describe the relations running between elements, thus creating the semantic city.
Each element is automatically associated to a sign, a unique marker that allows identifying it (two different elements will have different markers), and to access Augmented Reality content through it, and the element’s digital data, in real-time.
The marker is a generative visual sign which embeds the main information elements: the title, location, timeframe and classification.
On the other side of the diagram, people (citizens, residents, tourists) benefit from different ways with which to navigate the city.
Some of them allow them to navigate among all available elements: in semantic ways, surfing the information architecture, or pseudo-random ways.
Some other ways allow people to limit their scope. Every user can, in fact, personalize his/her own experience of the city and the ecosystem: explicitly, by configuring tastes and desires; implicitly, by using and taking part to the ecosystem, establishing affinities and differences which can be used semi-algorithmically as filters to suggest matches and possible interests.
Once an experience is over, people can enrich the ecosystem by publishing experiences, rankings, feedbacks, emotions, images and videos.
Operators can benefit from a dashboard mode through which they can observe the life of the city, thus being able to equalize parameters to optimize experiences and people’s engagement.
Of the many things proposed during the workshop, three have seemed to us as being outstanding:
Trieste Moving Center
The city of Trieste does not have a widely recognized landmark (such as the Colosseum in Rome) which can be immediately associated as its city center.
Furthermore, much of its richness is disseminated across its territory, and distributed throughout its historical center and its peripheries, which host architectures, parks and occasions for traditions, entertainment, good food and peculiar experiences.
The idea of creating a fixed centre did not obviously match this city configuration.
This is the reason why we chose to describe a moving center.
the City Wall
A movable landmark represents in real-time the life of the ecosystem of the city of Trieste. A visual map and a geographical map sit side by side and can be interacted with by touch and gestures to navigate the events, services, concerts, curiosities as well as the user-generated information.
A monument to the digital life of the city.
The landmark can be moved around the city: from time to time the administration chooses in which neighborhood to place it, fostering development of all the territories which make up the city, and establishing opportunities for novel events, paths throughout the city, unexpected traversals and, in general, having a tool which can be used to shift the focus of attention in the city together with the strategies for local and community development.
The landmark represents the life of the city: citizens living nearby it can benefit from the shifted focus of attention and, on top of that, feel their neighborhood valued and appreciated.
The movable center of the city opens up architecture and urbanism, turning it into an open, participatory flow.
The idea of the Experience Spots goes further in this direction.
Experience Spots are low-cost devices which implement micro-sensorial experiences which are disseminated throughout the city.
Designed as small boxes which are easily attached in most places, Experience Spots show minimal information like a certain environmental parameter, the density of presence in a certain spot of the city, or the speed of the Bora wind in the sidewalk along the sea. Or they can offer opportunities for minimal forms of interaction: a microphone into which to speak to leave a message to the next city dweller; a speaker from which to listen to the sound of another part of the city; a USB key sticking out of a wall onto which to leave sounds, videos or secret messages to other citizens; a real-time, city wide intercom, from which to communicate with other citizens somewhere else in the city; a single button creating some peculiar audio/visual effect; a minimal information visualization.
Experience Spots create a disseminated narrative of interactive experiences throughout the city: each one of them is made from a low cost device which is controlled by a street-computer which interconnects them to the city-cloud and to the rest of the ecosystem.
Experience Spots are also the most evident manifestation of the Open Source soul of the city. The city administration sells Experience Spots Development Kits for a few euros: artists, designers, entrepreneurs, engineers are invited to use them to invent and realize novel experiences, business, services which can use the city as a platform. Each new service can be added to the ecosystem, thus transforming the whole city into a Open Source platform for expression, creativity and sustainable, participatory, inclusive business.
All these characterizations are condensed and synthesized in the generative visual identity.
the generative visual identity
The visual identity proposed for the city of Trieste is generative and directly connected to the idea of the ecosystem.
Each element of the ecosystem benefits from a different, unique logo.
These generative logos are like databases, as each of their visual components is directly obtained from the information components of the element of the ecosystem:
The visual characteristics of these generative logos allow them to be printed out and be included into the communication and visual materials of the events/initiatives/hotels/etcetera, allowing them to have certified visual proof of their belonging to the city ecosystem.
Furthermore, their graphic characteristics allow them to be used as identifying markers: through a simple app developed during the workshop, they have been read as fiducial markers allowing a smartphone to read them to obtain all the relevant, on-marker information by simply taking a picture of them, as well as to associate the information about the event that was generated in real-time by people, such as reviews, images, videos, comments and more.
The next step of generative visuals, bringing the digital world onto the urban physical one.
Tutors:
Salvatore Iaconesi, Simone Paternich – ISIA Firenze
Students:
Mirko Balducci (ISIA Firenze), Lucia Del Zotto (ISIA Urbino), Daniele Dominici (ISIA Firenze), Marta Maldini (ISIA Urbino), Guido Marchesini (ISIA Firenze), Marina Metaxa (Architettura Trieste), Mattia Mezzabotta (ISIA Firenze), Peter Mišic (Università di Nova Gorica), Elena Penni (ISIA Firenze), Lorenzo Pentassuglia (Architettura Trieste), Francesco Puccinelli (ISIA Firenze), Stefania Tonello (ISIA Urbino), Francesca Toso (IUAV Venezia), Sara Ubaldini (ISIA Firenze), Diego Umari (Architettura Trieste)
Many thanks to:
Marco Barbariol, Stefano Maria Bettega, Cristina Caris, Alessandro Gaetano, Guerrino Lanci, Maniftso2020, Elena Marchigiani, Claudia Marcon, Alessandra Marin, Silvia Masetti, Piero Miceu, Fabio Omero, Ugo Padulosi, Oriana Persico, Alberto Sdegno, Federica Seganti, Edi Sommariva, Marco Svara, Adriano Venudo, Tania Zoffoli, The Hub Trieste and hotel Filoxenia and the whole city for the warm welcome
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PDF OF THE WORKSHOP RESULTS (ITALIAN)
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PDF OF THE PRESENTATION OF THE RESULTS (ITALIAN)
For Knowledge is Natural, we will be in the beautiful woods of the south of Italy to explore the possibility to re-appropriate sensibilities and knowledge about natural environments, using DIY, sustainable energy sources, Augmented Reality, Natural Interaction, Ubiquitous Technologies and the re-discovery of human relationships and emergent, peer-to-peer creativity.
Knowledge is Natural, August 19-25 2012, in Societing’s 3rd Summer School titled “Transmutation, the Next Mediterranean Way”.
The Summer School is created by the Mediterranean Societing Academy, Centro Studi Etnografia Digitale, Università degli Studi di Milano, Università degli Studi di Salerno, AOS – Art is Open Source.
in the woods
Most people living in urban contexts have lost connection to knowledge about natural environment.
For them, the beautiful wood in the image above would be, well, a beautiful wood, not a plentiful source of food, energy, medicines and wellness.
Or, more precisely, it could be that in their imagination natural environments could be perceived as being all of these positive things, but most of the time they would have no idea on how to exploit them or, even more, how to exploit them wisely, respectfully and sustainably.
People living in urban contexts have lost most of their knowledge about natural environments: for most of them nature is something defined as an administrative boundary (e.g.: the flowers and grass in the middle of a roundabout; flowers in a vase; a public park) or shrink-wrapped in a refrigerator (e.g.: the vegetables in supermarkets).
Just as other elements of the natural environment, plants have moved to the periphery of our field of view. Their life is almost purely aesthetic, with very few information about their function, benefits and roles in the ecosystem: a wealth of knowledge which remains hidden to most urban dwellers.
There’s more.
The problems which menace our planetary communities, the practices and habits which embody our difficulties in achieving wellness and a balanced life with nature and cultures different from our own, are often connected to the fact that rhythms, procedures, strategies and approaches of our daily lives are not the product of awareness and consciousness.
They are the result of a synthetic building process, created as a function of consumism and a general standard for “comfort” which is more oriented to having us purchase products and services than it is to allowing us to take a step back to enlarge our field of vision onto societies and living environments, allowing us to embrace approaches which are more holistic and relaxed in the ways in which we relate to the planet and fellow human beings.
Luckily human beings start becoming aware about the disequilibrium between what we perceive about the world and what the planet really has to offer, if only we manage to connect to different scales of values, rhythms and modalities.
Awareness and consciousness are obviously about information and knowledge, and on the perception of the possibility to build, share and disseminate them, transforming them into usable knowledge.
Ubiquitous networks and technologies will play an important role in our near future.
Traditions, visions and emergent approaches are an enormous richness for our planet.
It is now possible to imagine social and technological systems which will allow people to embed digital information into the world, using peer-to-peer dynamics and making them usable and accessible to an enormous variety of human beings.
Strolling through a wood is, for an urban dweller, an experience which is substantially aesthetic.
Using ubiquitous technologies we can imagine populating these spaces with information which could show us, for example, how to produce food, energy, spaces for relation and communication, modes and opportunities to heal and obtain wellness.
We can imagine adding our creativity to the natural environment and the knowledge which we produce, making both accessible to other people.
An unknown type of bush magically becomes a medicine. Trees become a source for food. Knowledge about the life-cycle of a certain environment transforms it into a highly sustainable source of energy.
augmented woods
With Knowledge is Natural we start a discovery process, trying to collaboratively imagine scenarios which could represent possible answers to a series of important questions.
How is it possible to create ubiquitous networks in natural environments, taking into account the lack of energy, connectivity and infrastructures, and measuring their sustainability, accessibility (divide, inclusion) and usability (alphabetization)?
Which forms could these networks assume? Made through computers and mobile devices or in alternative ways which are able to create bridges between analog and virtual worlds?
Which practices can facilitate and enable these approaches? Which needs are we able to satisfy? Which types of people can benefit from access to ubiquitous knowledge produced by multiple sources and peers in natural environment?
Which types of information could/should we make ubiquitously accessible through these practices and technologies? From the past (traditions), present (real-time, through the expressions of people and organizations) and (near) future (vision)?
How can this information be used in urban contexts? Gilles Clément’s Third Landscape perfectly describes nature in urban spaces: nomadic, interstitial, temporary, able to grow between the cracks of walls and along train tracks. Currently, Third Landscape is the main responsible for biodiversity in our cities, and represents an incredible, unused wealth for our well-being. And, even more, it inspires critical practices such as Guerrilla Gardening. Clément declared the need to train our gaze to recognize the Third Landscape and the opportunities it offers us.
How can we relate to nature in cities in different ways? How can we transfer innovative practices from rural to urban contexts?
The workshop will last 3 days in which we will collaborate in different ways to design and realize scenarios in which each participant will be able to elaborate a significative perspective on these questions.
We will work within nature. Our lab will be an innovative camp in which we will give life to novel forms of collaborative study and relation, throughout the day. The woods will be our classroom.
We will build a DIY sustainable energy source.
We will learn how to use it to power up laptops, smartphones and custom electronics.
We will create various forms of in-wood peer-to-peer networks in both technological and non-technological ways, allowing us to exchange information, publish it in natural environments and propagate it onto the Internet.
We will disseminate digital information in nature, harvest it, share it on the web and on social networks.
We will augment reality, in analog and digital ways, creating accessible, usable, inclusive and interconnective practices.
We will observe human and non-human activity in nature, using networks and custom electronics.
The workshop has no pre-requisites: anyone can join in.
If you never touched a smartphone, never written a line of programming code, never opened up a browser: you are welcome! And you are the right people for the experience!
From start to finish you will learn how to create usable knowledge, and how to share and disseminate it in natural environments.
If you are a hacker, designer, architect, artist, inventor, maker, camper, traveller: welcome to you too! We will work together to create the most sustainable, useful and inclusive, peer-to-peer knowledge ecosystem.
Lots of different things, like:
write to us at info@artisopensource.net
a workshop in trieste
We will be in Trieste from July 27th to August 2nd for “Insegna Trieste” a workshop to imagine and design the future of urban information and communication for the city.
Organized by the City Administration of the City of Trieste and by ISIA Design Florence, and with the collaboration of the Regional Administration of Friuli Venezia Giulia, the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Trieste, ISIA Urbino, IUAV University and the University of Nova Gorica the workshop will gather students to explore the city of Trieste from a new point of view, and trying to answer the question: “What is the information architecture of the city, as interpreted from a variety of cultures and points of view? How is it possible to define strategies and methodologies to design a system of signs, technologies and methodologies to represent it in meaningful ways? What is the future of urban signage?”
Urban signage is the street-interface for the city’s Information Architecture.
Information Architecture is a heterogeneous combination of different processes, including organization, categorization and the creation of navigation schemes in an Information System.
In the current scenario we can imagine to extend the set of techniques, methodologies and technologies which were classically used to design urban signage, and to include a wider, holistic, set of considerations into the discourse.
Ubiquitous technologies, tagging, augmented reality, urban screens and other technologies can be used to radically transform our experience of cities, as we navigate through streets, landmarks, businesses and opportunities for socialization, entertainment, culture, information and relation.
It is possible to embrace a holistic approach by taking into consideration the passage from Data, to Information, to Knowledge, to Wisdom.
from data to wisdom
Data, in city navigation, is composed by the positions of landmarks, streets and buildings, by the opening times of venues, by the presence of toilets and services. Or, in general, by discreet elements telling us what we know about the various things which are found in the city.
We can analyze elements of data to find relations among them. By interconnecting data in network of relations we can describe information. Information is a structure of data, a set of relationships among its elements, forming a network according to a certain strategy.
But we can go further. We can observe how data relates to other data to form information according to a series of recurring patterns. This is a valuable process, as it allows us to become aware of these patterns and to have a more useful point of view on reality, being able to understand information. This process is commonly defined as knowledge.
By understanding the principles according to which these patterns occur, we gain an even deeper understanding of reality, which we common refer to as wisdom.
Usually, urban signage refers to the domain of information. A series of scenarios and use cases are envisioned and, thus, the needs, desires and wishes of different types of users are evaluated to try to understand what information is more useful, and how it can be conveniently visualized onto signs, in accessible, usable ways: “A tourist is on the street in a certain city location, searching for the next landmark to visit.” Signage is designed in order to be visible, perceivable and understandable, allowing users to visually navigate the information domains of the city (mobility, environment, tourism, services, administration, regulations etcetera).
Now, specific technologies and methodologies can be used to assess the other two, valuable, scenarios of Information Architecture: Knowledge and Wisdom.
For example, in the touristic scenario, Knowledge could be represented by patterns of information, such as “the network of best landmarks for contemporary art lovers”, or “the accessible city”, or “the city’s venues, prioritized according to how my Facebook friends rate them”.
And Wisdom could be about understanding how people having similar cultures, contexts, tastes and needs have achieved their goals (for tourism, business, entertainment, sociality) in the city, and providing this as a service.
In our navigation through cities we mostly operate through visual queries.
What we see and experience in the city – and the way we interpret it according to context, culture and personal history – defines affordances for the use of public space.
Wether we operate in a task-based mode or wether something we see/hear/smell/touch in our environment synchs with our culture or sensibility of the moment, we perceive symbols, colors, shapes, and spatial layouts which suggest what is possible/impossible, suggested or advised against, promoted or prohibited in public space.
Affordances in public space are defined at visual, cultural, administrative and political levels, allowing us to experience a very complex set of stimulations coming directly from the urban environment.
Mobile, ubiquitous, devices – such as our smartphones – radically transform our experience of space. Though these devices we constantly experience a potentially infinite number of different, augmented, layers of information which fill the environment. Wether they come under the form of a call or a text message, through a geo-located social network element, via augmented reality, via the internet of things or via other digitally active object/space/architecture present in our surroundings, spaces transform in our perception thanks to the situated availability and perceivability of these elements of digital information.
Furthermore, these layers of information can be related to complex experiences, inventing entire new usage grammars to read, experience and perform public space.
This is what we will explore in the workshop.
The possibility to integrate Ubiquitous Publishing, Urban Sensing, Social Networking, Knowledge Ecosystems with Visual Design, Urban Design, Visual Thinking – and not forgetting to assess issues such as Digital Divide and Digital Inclusion – to reinvent the ways in which data, information, knowledge and wisdom are created, disseminated and shared in public space.
We will explore the city and try to understand people’s diversity and needs, and, thus, the information domains which are more relevant to them, as well as their needs for visual navigation systems at global, local and contextual levels.
We will then explore the ways in which digital technologies and networks can be used to go one step further, making richer forms of information accessible and usable, and also making Knowledge and Wisdom accessible, participatory, engaging for citizens and other forms of city dwellers.
We will turn all these insights into a proposal for a new Information Architecture for the city of Trieste, and for its interface: a novel, innovative signage system, across visual design and Ubiquitous Publishing.
Stay tuned for a report after the workshop.
Back in the city of Pompei for the next step for the future of our cities.
We will be in Pompei on June 3rd and 4th for iPompei, an event organized by the Public Administration of the City of Pompei together with the MIBAC (Italy’s Ministry for Cultural and Artistic Heritage), UNESCO, and MIUR (Italy’s Ministry for Education and Scientific Research) to present the second phase of the Ubiquitous Pompei project, together with a series of additional initiatives.
Ubiquitous Graffiti
As you might remember from our previous activities, the Ubiquitous Pompei project engaged high school students of the city of Pompei to provide them with technologies through which they have been able to start a participative process of designing their vision of the digital city, and to start to implement the first services which they imagined.
The project has been really successful so far, as the students skillfully engaged with the opportunities offered by ubiquitous technologies and created mobile applications and web systems which foster active citizen participation, as well as the emergence of new opportunities for public life.
The idea of creating an ubiquitous digital infrastructure for their city has been truly insightful for students, who have imagined tools for everyday life which allow people to engage the important themes of the city, to observe their societies and environments as they live, in real-time, and to promote new opportunities which emerge by combining public, participated city-governance and decision making processes, open data, and the possibility to relate to fellow citizens who share the same interests and visions, and to collaborate with them to the design and implementation of new opportunities.
the first phase of the project
This has been a truly important action, as it was designed to activate the young students of Pompei’s high schools, and to bring them to direct contact with the public administration to pragmatically suggest new visions.
We promoted a form of peer-to-peer education and knowledge model, in which we acted as technological facilitators. We created a series of technological tools which students could use to design and assemble their ideas for services and citizen-centered processes.
Students learned about the possibilities offered by the technologies and autonomously designed their visions and services, with our help on the technical and technological side.
In the next step of the project, several innovations will take place:
This project has been a real breakthrough, with innovative ideas springing up at each phase and quickly turning into real services which can be freely used by the rest of the population.
the first phase of the project
The project has been chosen by Italy’s Digital Agenda as a best practice for the thematic tables which are leading the design of the policies which will conduct the country’s digital future. A team of consultants of the Ministry of Education and Research (and, specifically, Damien Lanfrey and Dario Carrera) has been following us closely in this, providing fundamental insights about the strategies which could be used to further enhance this project and to enable it to scale nationwide.
All this, together, has brought to this second stage of the project which will be presented in Pompei on June 3rd and 4th. The start of the city-wide process which will let the specifications of the next stage of the project emerge and, then, start the next phase of design and implementation. And the start of the phase through which the project will form its strategy for scalability, engaging other schools and the other public administrations which have already shown interest in the process.
Community Development
The process will begin with citizens.
The MIUR has kindly provided us with the Ubiquitous Italy platform on IdeaScale to start the public discussion with citizens.
We will keep you updated.
On Sunday June 3rd we will be at the City Hall (4pm – 6pm) in an event which is dedicated to the whole population of the city of Pompei for a workshop in which we will start the participatory design process of the digital city.
On Monday June 4th, at 12am, we will be again at the city hall with a meeting with the media and press, where we, together with the City Administration and the MIUR will officially present the next stages of the project.
More info can be found here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/315263055219704/
http://denaro.it/ipompei/2012/05/30/il-programma-del-forum/
Here is the presentation that we will give during the event: