Search and the City: Comparing the Use of WiFi in New York, Budapest and Montreal

Over the past five years, the use of mobile and wireless technology in public spaces of cities around the country has grown exponentially. Recently, cities including Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, Minneapolis, and Austin have announced plans to build municipal wireless networks. These projects make a number of assumptions about the payoffs of municipal wireless networks without the benefit of research on the communication practices of users. To date, there is little such research. In addition, wireless technology – specifically, wireless fidelity or WiFi -- is often discussed as one of many ways to access the high-speed (broadband) Internet i.e. cable, digital subscriber line (DSL), fiber etc. Thus, there has been little analysis of the ways in which the use of the wireless Internet via WiFi may differ from that of the wireline Internet. In order to understand the potential user patterns that will be observed with respect to emerging technologies, it is necessary to disaggregate research about the various ways of connecting to the Internet.This paper compares the results from a six-month survey of the use of WiFi hotspots in New York, Budapest and Montreal. It is hoped that further analysis of these survey results will contribute to a more acute understanding of the ways in which the user patterns of particular modes of Internet access may differ internationally. The major research questions addressed in this paper are: 1) How is WiFi being used in public spaces, by whom, where, for what purposes?; 2) How does the use of WiFi differ from other communication technology?; and, 3) How is the use of WiFi similar or different across cities internationally? This paper makes the following arguments based on the survey data: first, WiFi is an important factor in attracting people to specific locations; second, the use of WiFi highly localized in that it is often used to search for information relevant to one's geographic location; third, there are significant differences in the way that WiFi is used across a variety of locations including cafes, parks and other public spaces; fourth, at present, WiFi users are, for the most part, young, male and highly educated displaying the characteristics of early adopters of technology; and, fifth, there is a convergence in the ways in which WiFi is used internationally in some respects, however there are also important differences in the reasons for these uses as well divergence in other respects.These findings may have an important impact in shaping current discussions municipal wireless networks by helping to identify content, applications and services that can be delivered overmobile and wireless networks. In addition, the answers to these questions are vital to inform a wide variety of legal and public policy issues related to information and communication technologies in addition to being important to the development of content and applications for mobile and wireless technologies. These include policies surrounding municipal wireless networks, spectrum, universal service, community media and network neutrality

Thinking with Things: Landscapes, Connections and Performances as Modes of Building Shared Understanding

This article explores the relatively underexplored potential for physicalisations to materialise qualitative data related to human experiences and knowledge domains. Our reading of ‘data’ in this context extends from imperceptible systems and infrastructures to mental models and the phenomenological dimensions of experiences themselves. Physical objects can be regarded as a form of knowledge with which to inquire about human life, bring about improved conditions, and imagine alternative realities. Objects are made of materials, which are manipulated materials into various configurations. The materials used in the process of externalisation have a profound influence on the resulting forms, and through them on how knowledge is constructed and internalised. We pay detailed attention to the characteristics of materials and how they are combined, in the context of interdisciplinary exchange. We are motivated by the need for a shared understanding of what work materials can do in the making of physicalisations. We suggest this work is useful in the analysis of physicalisations, specifically where they seek to articulate the phenomena of lived experience

Critique as Collaboration in Design Anthropology

Design anthropology is an emerging field at the intersection of design and anthropology with a distinct style of knowing. This paper argues that in order to create transdisciplinary practices around collaboration for design anthropology, the field must understand existing practices of critique in the field of design. Based on a two-year National Science Foundation funded study of collaboration with designers and design educators in four countries, this article describes the culture of critique that underpins the collaborative practices of designers. In particular, designers often participate in a studio-based culture of critique, which is learned in art and design schools, even when it is not explicitly taught. Finally, as the field of design anthropology matures to include global networks of scholars and practitioners, it is useful to consider the ways in which emergent practices of critique as collaboration, supported by digital platforms, might move beyond the design studio and into distributed collaborations

Designing Transformative Futures

What makes the design of futures sufficiently transformative? Worldwide, people are aware of the need to change and keep changing to address eco-social challenges and their fall-out in an age of crises and transitions in climate, biodiversity, and health. Calls for climate justice and the development of eco-social sensibilities speak to the need for dynamic and provisional engagements. Such concerns raise age-old issues of inequality and colonialist destruction. Our designs carry the imprint of this current politics, wittingly or unwittingly, into worlds to come. This conversa- tion asked how might we respond fluidly to coming uncertainties, questioning our own practices to sow the seeds of more radical transformation, while recognizing the structural forces that can limit or temper opportunities for design activism. It was or- ganized in three quadrant exercises, which we also reflect upon

Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds

This paper introduces “infrastructural speculations,” an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds the “lifeworld” of artifacts—the social, perceptual, and political environment in which they exist. While speculative designs often imply a lifeworld, infrastructural speculations place lifeworlds at the center of design concern, calling attention to the cultural, regulatory, environmental, and repair conditions that enable and surround particular future visions. By articulating connections and affinities between speculative design and infrastructure studies research, we contribute a set of design tactics for producing infrastructural speculations. These tactics help design researchers interrogate the complex and ongoing entanglements among technologies, institutions, practices, and systems of power when gauging the stakes of alternate lifeworlds

Breakdown in the Smart City: Exploring Workarounds with Urban-sensing Practices and Technologies

Smart cities are now an established area of technological development and theoretical inquiry. Research on smart cities spans from investigations into its technological infrastructures and design scenarios, to critiques of its proposals for citizenship and sustainability. This article builds on this growing field, while at the same time accounting for expanded urban-sensing practices that take hold through citizen-sensing technologies. Detailing practice-based and participatory research that developed urban-sensing technologies for use in Southeast London, this article considers how the smart city as a large-scale and monolithic version of urban systems breaks down in practice to reveal much different concretizations of sensors, cities, and people. By working through the specific instances where sensor technologies required inventive workarounds to be setup and continue to operate, as well as moments of breakdown and maintenance where sensors required fixes or adjustments, this article argues that urban sensing can produce much different encounters with urban technologies through lived experiences. Rather than propose a “grassroots” approach to the smart city, however, this article instead suggests that the smart city as a figure for urban development be contested and even surpassed by attending to workarounds that account more fully for digital urban practices and technologies as they are formed and situated within urban projects and community initiatives

Digital cities 6 : concepts, methods and systems of urban informatics (Workshop)

Exploring key challenges of urban informatics research and development, this workshop looks at concepts, research methods and instruments that become the microscope of urban anatomy. We want to discuss urban informatics systems that provide real-time tools for examining the real-time city, to picture the invisible and to zoom into a fine-grained resolution of urban environments that reveal the depth and contextual nuances of urban metabolism processes at work