Program your city: Designing an urban integrated open data API

Cities accumulate and distribute vast sets of digital information. Many decision-making and planning processes in councils, local governments and organisations are based on both real-time and historical data. Until recently, only a small, carefully selected subset of this information has been released to the public – usually for specific purposes (e.g. train timetables, release of planning application through websites to name just a few). This situation is however changing rapidly. Regulatory frameworks, such as the Freedom of Information Legislation in the US, the UK, the European Union and many other countries guarantee public access to data held by the state. One of the results of this legislation and changing attitudes towards open data has been the widespread release of public information as part of recent Government 2.0 initiatives. This includes the creation of public data catalogues such as data.gov.au (U.S.), data.gov.uk (U.K.), data.gov.au (Australia) at federal government levels, and datasf.org (San Francisco) and data.london.gov.uk (London) at municipal levels. The release of this data has opened up the possibility of a wide range of future applications and services which are now the subject of intensified research efforts. Previous research endeavours have explored the creation of specialised tools to aid decision-making by urban citizens, councils and other stakeholders (Calabrese, Kloeckl & Ratti, 2008; Paulos, Honicky & Hooker, 2009). While these initiatives represent an important step towards open data, they too often result in mere collections of data repositories. Proprietary database formats and the lack of an open application programming interface (API) limit the full potential achievable by allowing these data sets to be cross-queried. Our research, presented in this paper, looks beyond the pure release of data. It is concerned with three essential questions: First, how can data from different sources be integrated into a consistent framework and made accessible? Second, how can ordinary citizens be supported in easily composing data from different sources in order to address their specific problems? Third, what are interfaces that make it easy for citizens to interact with data in an urban environment? How can data be accessed and collected

DataChopin: A collaborative interface for data visualisation and composition on large interactive screens

DataChopin is a research prototype that explores the democratisation of data analytics and sensemaking capabilities. The collaborative interface is a major outcome of sustained research efforts at the Urban Informatics Research Lab, part of the QUT Design Lab, in citizen science and public engagement with urban data. It was developed over the course of multiple iterations spanning across three use cases. Its distinctive characteristics are the use of large, interactive displays as a shared desktop, as well as flexible composition mechanisms for incremental construction of visualisations. By studying interfaces for composing data and visual forms, this research contributes to the understanding of the fundamental components and structure of visualisations, resulting in a general and flexible compositional model. This lays the groundwork for data exploration tools that allow non-expert users to mix, match, and manipulate datasets to obtain visual representations requiring little to no programming knowledge

Exploring tangible interaction for map-based feedback

This paper describes the development of a series of tangible feedback mechanisms for an analogue map-based feedback interface. By prototyping interactions with simple everyday analogue materials, the goal was to explore playful, tangible input methods for our interface, beyond a more conventional screen-based approach that could inform future development of a digital map-based feedback interface. Four different prototype interactions were developed that could work in a completely analogue implementation. These interactions were installed and evaluated as part of an in-the-wild deployment of a larger project, which was used as part of a community consultation process. By analysing how people used our interaction prototypes and the feedback that they left, data was collected to inform later iterations with the kinds of interaction approaches that can successfully engage participants and the most effective methods of soliciting feedback

Extreme participation - Moving extreme programming towards participatory design

Extreme Programming (XP) is a lightweight software development methodology that has risen to prominence in the last few years. XP and Participatory Design are related in motivation and approach but complimentary in many ways. The authors believe that integrating some Participatory Design approaches into XP substantially improves XP and may even bring some advantages to Participatory Design. This paper summarises XP, compares the two approaches, outlines our experience with XP, draws out some problems with classic XP and suggests some modifications based on Participatory Design

CubIT: Large-scale multi-user presentation and collaboration

CubIT is a multi-user, large-scale presentation and collaboration framework installed at the Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) Cube facility, an interactive facility made up 48 multi-touch screens and very large projected display screens. CubIT was built to make the Cube facility accessible to QUT’s academic and student population. The system allows users to upload, interact with and share media content on the Cube’s very large display surfaces. CubIT implements a unique combination of features including RFID authentication, content management through multiple interfaces, multi-user shared workspace support, drag and drop upload and sharing, dynamic state control between different parts of the system and execution and synchronisation of the system across multiple computing nodes

A customisable dashboard display for environmental performance visualisations

We conducted an exploratory study of a mobile energy monitoring tool: The Dashboard. Our point of departure from prior work was the emphasis of end-user customisation and social sharing. Applying extensive feedback, we deployed the Dashboard in real-world conditions to socially linked research participants for a period of five weeks. Participants were encouraged to devise, construct, place, and view various data feeds. The aim of our study was to test the assumption that participants, having control over their Dashboard configuration, would engage, and remain engaged, with their energy feedback throughout the trial. Our research points to a set of design issues surrounding the adoption and continued use of such tools. A novel finding of our study is the impact of social links between participants and their continued engagement with the Dashboard. Our results also illustrate the emergence of energy-voyeurism, a form of social energy monitoring by peers

Supporting collaboration on very large-scale interactive wall surfaces

In this paper we describe CubIT, a multi-user presentation and collaboration system installed at the Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) Cube facility. The ‘Cube’ is an interactive visualisation facility made up of five very large-scale interactive multi-panel wall displays, each consisting of up to twelve 55-inch multi-touch screens (48 screens in total) and massive projected display screens situated above the display panels. The paper outlines the unique design challenges, features, implementation and evaluation of CubIT. The system was built to make the Cube facility accessible to QUT’s academic and student population. CubIT enables users to easily upload and share their own media content, and allows multiple users to simultaneously interact with the Cube’s wall displays. The features of CubIT were implemented via three user interfaces, a multi-touch interface working on the wall displays, a mobile phone and tablet application and a web-based content management system. Each of these interfaces plays a different role and offers different interaction mechanisms. Together they support a wide range of collaborative features including multi-user shared workspaces, drag and drop upload and sharing between users, session management and dynamic state control between different parts of the system. The results of our evaluation study showed that CubIT was successfully used for a variety of tasks, and highlighted challenges with regards to user expectations regarding functionality as well as issues arising from public use

CubIT: Design and evaluation of a collaboration-tool for large interactive wall surfaces

In this book chapter we describe the design and evaluation of CubIT, a multi-user presentation and collaboration system installed at the Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) Cube facility. The ‘Cube’ is an interactive visualisation facility made up of five very large-scale interactive multi-panel wall displays, each consisting of up to twelve 55-inch multi-touch screens (48 screens in total) and additional very large projected display screens situated above the display panels. The chapter outlines the unique design challenges, features, implementation and evaluation of CubIT. The system was built to make the Cube facility accessible to QUT’s academic and student population. CubIT enables users to easily upload and share their own media content, and allows multiple users to simultaneously interact with the Cube’s wall displays. The features of CubIT are made available via three user interfaces, a multi-touch interface working on the wall displays, a mobile phone and tablet application and a web-based content management system. Each of these interfaces play different roles and offers different interaction mechanisms, appropriate to the underlying platform. Through its interfaces CubIT supports a wide range of collaborative features including multi-user shared workspaces, drag and drop upload and sharing between users, session management and dynamic state control between different parts of the system. The results of our longitudinal evaluation study showed that CubIT was successfully used for a variety of tasks, but also highlighted specific challenges with regards to user expectations as well as issues arising from public use

Supporting collaboration in large-scale multi-user workspaces

CubIT is a multi-user, large-scale presentation and collaboration framework installed at the Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) Cube facility, an interactive facility made up 48 multi-touch screens and very large projected display screens. The CubIT system allows users to upload, interact with and share their own content on the Cube’s display surfaces. This paper outlines the collaborative features of CubIT which are implemented via three user interfaces, a large-screen multi-touch interface, a mobile phone and tablet application and a web-based content management system. Each of these applications plays a different role and supports different interaction mechanisms supporting a wide range of collaborative features including multi-user shared workspaces, drag and drop upload and sharing between users, session management and dynamic state control between different parts of the system