Data Drifts and Tactical Toolkits

Complex urban issues like the transformation of mobility infrastructure require the collaboration of diverse stakeholders and affected groups. At the same time urban data and analytical tools are powerful planning perspectives – which are however limited to an expert audience. Therefore, in this project we explore how we can combine situated knowledge with urban data in decision making processes.

During this semester project we will create participatory tool kits in the context of the EU-research project Mobility NEBourhoods. This project explores how sustainable traffic infrastructures can be designed and implemented in Neuperlach through a hybrid co-creation process.

Building upon experimental participatory formats, we will ask how digital technologies like Augmented Reality, generative AI, or gamified Applications can support co-creation processes. Thus, we will develop tools to contextualize urban data, incorporate perspectives of multiple stakeholders and mediate heterogeneous collaborations.

Urban Exploration

Together with artists and creatives involved in the NEBourhoods project we will experiment with open-ended, embodied and playful participation formats. We will investigate how drifting in urban spaces, photography, and model-building open up situated perspectives on urban spaces and can help us to contextualize data-sets. Furthermore we will engage with literature and theory related to these approaches, e.g., data feminism, the situationists, Spaziergangswissenschaften and critical cartography.

Assembling Tools and Formating Collaboration

We will investigate how digital media can augment, support and remake these approaches. Concretely we will develop concepts for data-supported collaboration formats and develop paper prototypes of digital toolkits. Engaging with digital media becomes an opportunity to rethink with what biases we perceive urban spaces, how we collaborate, and how we can share our tools.

Prototyping Participation

Lastly, we will implement these concepts as working prototypes with a specific focus on human-computer interaction, interfaces and data visualization. This process will be supported by workshops on programming, game-engines and data visualization (no previous knowledge is necessary). Lastly, we will assemble hybrid toolkits including digital prototypes, performative instructions and mapping material, which we will test in Neuperlach.