MEDIALAB02 1415 BRIEFING

Notitie        The project will be supervised in English. All (final) documents should be written in English.

Data & the City

Prototyping data-enabled urban experiences

Achtergrond opdrachtgever:

At Creating 010, we are interested in Urban Interaction Design and actively looking for collaborations on this field. A successful earlier project was ‘Rotterdam Open Data’, which resulted in the Municipality of Rotterdam publishing and share different datasets they use. Today this data is public and available for anyone to use it (www.rotterdamopendata.nl). Currently we are getting engaged in new collaborations which build on the datasets in order to create new, data-enabled urban experiences.

Opdracht inleiding/ Introduction

In partnership with IGO (Instituut voor de Gebouwde Omgeving - HR) and a neighborhood of Rotterdam, we are seeking for innovative solutions which connects the triangle of:

• Neighborhood
• Homes / buildings
• Individuals.

The solutions to improve the situation of these stakeholders vary on a broad range. Solutions for smart homes can improve how individuals connect to their built environment; think of the Nest thermostat (https://nest.com/) as a pioneer example. Solutions for a neighborhood community can foster a sharing economy; just how Peerby (http://peerby.com/) facilitates borrowing items from your neighbors, and in the meanwhile building connections with them. Wearable devices (e.g. sport trackers like Fitbit) and smartphones containing dozens of different sensors helps individuals in recording someone’s physical movement as digital data.

The data abundance from all the above cases leads to new challenges for designers and technologists. We seek for solutions, which go beyond “yet-another-Facebook-for-neighborhoods” and “yet-another-smartified-product”.

Our target group is inhabitants from a neighborhood of Rotterdam.

Problem statement

The main objective is to explore potential new solutions (or services, experiences) which tap on the data in the urban context.

During the Medialab projects we want to see the proof-of-concept realizations of big, hairy, visionary solutions for improving neighborhoods/homes/individuals. We welcome working prototypes, which tap on existing open data and various API-s: from city-specific ones (RET, Port of Rotterdam, etc.) to social media (Twitter, Spotify, Instagram, etc.)

Possible questions to explore

• How to present “boring/raw/dry” urban data (such as maps with demographics, statistics) in an engaging way?
• Visualization is the first step to make the data “seen”. How to support users or city officials to make sense of it, use it for their decision making?
• What potential does the available datasets have to provide more insight for citizens?
• By products “going data-driven”, what behaviors can be motivated in the city (by the city)?
• How to support neighborhoods to sense their environment, and how can they use sensor networks for air quality, noise, etc.?
• Connecting people through data-driven-services

Desired outcomes:

• We have a large emphasis on proof-of-concept working prototypes. A dirty hack is more welcomed than wireframes and pitches.
• The solutions should be meaningful for the inhabitants of a neighborhood.
• Preferred solutions utilize available datasets from Rotterdam, or combine them with dynamic data from the city (such as RET). We look for new, novel products (interfaces, services, experiences) which could be deployed in 1-2 years in Rotterdam. Dream big!

Examples, inspiration

Teaser of Hackday “Data of the Crowd” (https://vimeo.com/91005067): a vision of interwining wearable devices and urban data.

Pints in the sun (http://pintsinthesun.co.uk): A pub finder in London to find such pubs which are not in the shade.

Travic (http://tracker.geops.ch/?z=14&s=1&x=497108.2146&y=6785721.1137&l=transport). Real time map of the actual traffic. Link shows Rotterdam.

The project is part of AppLab. There will be a collaboration with IGO (Instituut voor de Gebouwde Omgeving) and Creating010.

Contactgegevens:

Naam contactpersoon(en): Peter van Waart

Organisatie: Creating010

Telefoon:

E-mail: p.van.waart@hr.nl

Web: www.creating010.com