Urban User Interface

The January 2011 Egyptian uprising in Tahrir Square was called a “Facebookrevolution,” but its importance is not that it was digital, but rather thatinformation and space were bound in an arena for social change. Historical,symbolic, and cultural attributes embedded within and ascribed to thisspace combined with the mobilizing power of social media were central toits revolutionary success. A new city is emerging based on this virtual andspatial intersection: the Urban User Interface.The walled city is obsolete. The city as a movement system is absorbed.The city as walled fortress made space the main form of meaning: the wallmarked the boundary between urban and rural, the public square markedthe important center of social exchange, and cathedral and palace markedthe literal apogees of ecclesiastical and secular power. The city as movementwas an outgrowth of transportation technologies from rail to automobiles.Any clear boundary between the urban and rural was obliterated, andcities spread along the arteries of movement; a system of flows without fixedboundaries. By contrast, contemporary cities are suffused with information,transmitted by an increasingly dispersed network of laptops, tablets, andsmart phones. Our ComputingInPlace research group has been studying thecontemporary coexistence of information technology and the city throughthe lens of HCI.Interactivity is a perception that a user sometimes senses while using acomputer; this implies that the idea of a single map of the city is naive. Digitalflaneurs expect instant and continuous data about shopping, navigation,history, weather, politics. We have developed representations of the city thatare user-centered, based both on location and on the interests at hand. Wehave distinguished between spatial and semantic descriptions of the city,and have demonstrated how to translate knowledge between the two.Direct manipulation refers to the move from command line interfaces tographical user interfaces and then to fully physically embedded systems.We have developed a framework for displays and computing in public thatanalyzes physical space as a critical part of the interface, incorporating boththe virtual and the physical vectors for a wide range of input and outputdevices. We have developed techniques to map and understand the relationshipbetween mobilized services and location-based information via socialmedia. The overlay of real-time information onto space reveals reconfiguredsocial patterns of exchange and of movement.Affordance is a term from psychology that studies cognition not as an internalstate but as an interaction with a particular environment. Using anthropologicalideas of place and perceptual concepts from computer vision, wehave shown how to extract meaning from a complex public setting and useit as part of a public interface.Information technology is not only redefining how we receive, generate, andcommunicate information, but it also is directly linked to the reconfigurationof social, political, and economic processes within our urban environments.We are discovering alternative methods of representing the city to replacetired ideas of formal repetition and hermetic systems.

Volume Editors
Martha Thorne & Xavier Costa

ISBN
978-0-935502-83-1