Interctivos12 @ Science Gallery, Dublin
‘Mobile Cityscapes’ is an urban awareness experiment which attempts to ‘hack’ (crowdsource) subjective urban data: city dwellers’ experiences, emotions and meanings attached to spaces in the city they move through in their everyday lives. The experiment explores an approach to citizen participation in decision-making regarding city aspects that are inextricably linked to citizens’ everyday lives and also to urban sustainability – specifically, urban mobility. The resulting digital platform – prototyped through the experiment – is seen as one of the tools which could allow the public to take part in decision-making processes in a meaningful and collaborative way. GPS technology is used in the experiment as a collaborative, participatory and creative medium, which makes visible the relationship movement/space/time, while representing an interventionist way of raising individual and collective awareness of how space is designed and used. The digital prototype employs narratives, photography, sound and video as further ways of raising awareness, and for opening up conversations about current and potential uses of everyday spaces (e.g. movement through).
The experiment is part of Corelia Baibarac‘s PhD research project. Moreover, it is part of the collective endeavour of a multi-disciplinary research group in Trinity College Dublin – TrinityHaus – who aim with their projects to tangibly contribute to the improvement of the city, for its people and the environment.