359 research outputs found

    Improving Community Engagement through Urban Physical and Technological Experiences

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    There is an opportunity to add value to community engagement by provoking the interaction between urban dwellers, physical urban space and virtual experiences. This research project focuses on identifying the experiential and participatory tools embedded in temporary and architectural elements, interactive technological platforms and urban supports in order to build a link between virtual and physical realms. A variety of research methods, analysis, visual tools and foresight exploration techniques serve for the creation of design principles that become the foundation of the conceptual framework of civic portals that enhance individual and collective appreciation of physical space

    Flood Risk Governance for More Resilience

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    Flood risks worldwide are being exacerbated due to urbanisation and the consequences of climate change. This poses a challenge to traditional managerial approaches to flood risk management that try to be ‘fail-safe’. This book presents innovative and practical lessons on how to make flood risk management strategies ‘safe-to-fail’ and therewith more resilient. The book focuses on governance – rather than technical/managerial – approaches. As the book shows, new governance strategies are needed that ensure that flood risk management is not left to water managers alone. Various actors, including spatial planners, contingency agencies, NGOs and individual citizens, have a role to play in flood risk governance. Ten chapters assess different case studies from around the globe. These highlight the challenges and good practices related to learning, inter- and transdisciplinary cooperation, and debating and meeting the normative end-goals of flood risk governance. This book is essential reading for grounded scholars, reflexive policymakers and practitioners, and everyone else who is interested in contributing to more resilient and future-proof flood risk governance

    Video Games for Earthly Survival: Gaming in the Post-Anthropocene

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    In this paper I evaluate the sixth mass extinction on planet Earth, and its implications for the medium of the video game. The Anthropocene, a term popularized by the end of the 20th century to refer to the geological impact of human beings on planet Earth, assumes temporal development, a ‘before’ and ‘after’ the appearance of humankind. The ‘after’ period, the Post-Anthropocene, is repeatedly claimed by scientists to be approaching within the next few decades, as over-consumption is destroying vital resources of the planet. Allegedly, the sixth mass extinction in the history of our planet is already unfolding, and might determine the disappearance of life from Earth and, as far as we know, from the Universe and beyond. Video games responding to the arrival of the future is not just imagined in fictional settings (e.g. The Legenda of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Nintendo, 2000; Horizon: Zero Dawn, Guerrilla Games, 2017), but within game design. In the last decade an increasing number of video games requiring limited human intervention has been released. Incremental/ idle games such as Cookie Clicker (Julien Thiennot, 2013) and AdVenture Capitalist (Hyper Hippo Productions, 2014) require an initial input from the player to start, and then keep playing themselves in the background operations of a laptop or smartphone. Virtual environments can be entirely designed by algorithms, as experimented by Hello Games for No Man’s Sky (2016). Artificial Intelligence is also used to play games. Screeps, a massive-multiplayer online game, requires players to program an AI that will play the game in their place, and which will “live within the game even while you are offline” (Screeps Team, 2014). Ghost cars in racing games replace the human actor with a representation of their performance. The same concept is further explored by the Drivatar of the Forza Motorsport series (Microsoft Studios, 2005-2017), which simulates the driving style of the player and competes online against other AI-controlled cars. These are only some of the examples that suggest that human beings are becoming peripheral in the act of playing games. In short, it is probably becoming ‘easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of gaming’. While studies on games with no players, and on the non-human side of gaming, have been proposed in the past, my presentation takes a non-normative and non-systemic approach to the study of games for the Post-Anthropocene. I am concerned with the creative potential of the paradoxes, spoofs, and contradictions opened by games that take Man/Anthropos as being no longer at the centre of ‘interaction’, ‘fun’, and many other mythological aspects of digital gaming. Nonhuman gaming questions the historical, political, ecological and even geological situatedness of our knowledge on games and gamers, interaction and passivity, life and death

    The Paranoiac-Critical Method of Reflectance Transformation Imaging

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    A performative talk examining Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), an open source computational photographic process that is transforming methodologies in archaeology and heritage conservation for its ability to interactively re-light artefacts within a virtual hemisphere of illumination and extrude a digital topography that is hyper-legible in space-time, from its contemporary application in facial recognition via Bertrand Tavernier's 1980 science fiction film La Mort en Direct and a return of the death mask through digital extrusion, ultimately locating a progenitor of the heightened objectivity promised by RTI paradoxically in Surrealist photography and the fugitive facialities of Salvador Dali's Paranoiac-Critical Method. As emerging imaging technologies such as RTI are seen to open novel ways of extracting latent data from historical artefacts, reassembling objects of study in a new (virtual) light, collateral opportunities provided by these technologies to re-enter archival still and moving image recordings inadvertently recalibrate their spatio-temporal ground and destabilise their indexical reading through an excessive production of new traces and signs. If methodologies can be seen to play a significant role in constructing their objects of study, then emerging computational imaging operations such as RTI have their own subjectivities to disclose: In performing a media archaeology of this digital process, the talk proposes that we not only narrate the subjects of our study but the very tools of investigation themselves

    Integrative Sonic Urbanism: Artist-Led Strategies for Urban Sound Design in the Contemporary City

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    This doctoral research advances the fields of urban sound design and acoustic planning, presenting new ways of exploring the interrelationship between individual and collective sonic experience, the dynamic potential of the urban sound environment and the complex evolution of the contemporary cityscape. It links urban sound art practices with larger urban design processes, revealing how sound contributes to the production of urban space. The research progresses by crafting a dynamic, integrative methodology that activates contrasting sonic perspectives to critically reassess the role of sound in the public realm. As it discloses this methodology, the research navigates the tension between new modes of urban sound design guided by critical artistic practice and more conventional strategies rooted in the paradigm of environmental noise. Efforts to address urban sonic conditions through quantifiable metrics are contextualised within a wider transition in which urban form is increasingly influenced by data capture, analysis and governance. Within this transition, the critical potential of sound as an active component of urban space is obscured by remedial strategies established to improve what are construed as unfavourable conditions. This research analyses the relationship between these remedial strategies, the emergence of the ISO soundscape standard and the concepts of urban ambiances, urban atmospheres and acoustic territories. It postulates that these centralising conceptual models can serve to limit as well as to advance the critical potential of this field, pursuing instead a more tactical, performative and pluralistic methodology. The articulation of this methodology is substantiated through the exposition of three major public artworks developed by the author, including: Continuous Drift (2015–), a permanent sound installation in a public urban square; The Manual for Acoustic Planning and Urban Sound Design (2013–2020), an artist placement exploring the role of the acoustic planner within a local authority; and The Office for Common Sound (2016–), a project space that fosters dialogue concerning sound within specific regional and institutional contexts. These projects expand the role of artistic practice within the context of urban design and spatial planning by activating the field of urban sound design within diverse spatial, administrative and social contexts. These projects extend established methodologies drawn from sound art, site-specific art and sound installation practices with tactics inherited from public, participatory and socially engaged art, demonstrating how artist-led strategies for urban sound design can advance new forms of spatial production through collaboration with diverse urban actors

    Data and the city – accessibility and openness. a cybersalon paper on open data

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    This paper showcases examples of bottom–up open data and smart city applications and identifies lessons for future such efforts. Examples include Changify, a neighbourhood-based platform for residents, businesses, and companies; Open Sensors, which provides APIs to help businesses, startups, and individuals develop applications for the Internet of Things; and Cybersalon’s Hackney Treasures. a location-based mobile app that uses Wikipedia entries geolocated in Hackney borough to map notable local residents. Other experiments with sensors and open data by Cybersalon members include Ilze Black and Nanda Khaorapapong's The Breather, a "breathing" balloon that uses high-end, sophisticated sensors to make air quality visible; and James Moulding's AirPublic, which measures pollution levels. Based on Cybersalon's experience to date, getting data to the people is difficult, circuitous, and slow, requiring an intricate process of leadership, public relations, and perseverance. Although there are myriad tools and initiatives, there is no one solution for the actual transfer of that data

    Re-architecture : lifespan rehabilitation of built heritage - scapus

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