SenCity: uncovering the hidden pulse of a city (workshop)

Abstract

Cities act as hubs designed to accommodate and support millions of inhabitants, nomads and tourists that rely on the city's infrastructure to move around, communicate and flourish as individuals and as a community. This shapes the culture, habits and pulse of a city creating an organic urban landscape often invisible to the naked eye, but traceable digitally. With the proliferation of sensing and pervasive technologies, we should be able to tell the levels of crowdedness of the city, its mood, or how clean it is by sensing and visualising these aspects. However, this poses interesting research and design questions; how would one design a device for tracking and visualising crowdedness on buses, for example. This workshop aims to explore the use of sensing technologies for visually resurfacing some of the hidden dynamics of the city by providing a collaborative and facilitated environment for applied research and creative exploration. This complements other workshops in the "urban" or "cities" theme, such as PURBA (Pervasive Urban Applications), that investigate urban environments from a theoretical perspective. After initial discussions on a joint workshop, the SenCity and PURBA organisers concluded that these workshops were complementary yet different enough to give participants the benefit of taking part in both; gaining the theory from PURBA and collaboratively applying practical research and creative flair at the SenCity workshop to sense, visualise and share the hidden pulse of Zürich.