St Andrews HCI Research Group

22

Nov 2013

Ingi Helgason, Urban Interaction Design: addressing future, hybrid cities through critical design


<!–Speaker: Ingi Helgason, Edinburgh Napier University
Date/Time: 2-3pm Jan 21, 2013
Location: 1.33b Jack Cole, University of St Andrews–>
Abstract:
This talk will present the work of the UrbanIxD project’s interdisciplinary summer school that took place in Croatia in August 2013. The goal of the summer school was the production of fictional concepts that explored the active role of citizens as designers, users and inhabitants in the emerging socio-technical situations that might characterise the Hybrid City of the near-future. The built environment is already in the process of being enriched with layers of data gathering computation and, combined with our own personal mobile technologies, this is offering a myriad of new urban informatics experiences and possibilities.
By employing a Critical Design methodology the UrbanIxD FP7 project is providing an opportunity to re-think what networked and connected communities of the future might look like. The project is questioning the premise of the “smart city” and is developing a community of researchers with a shared commitment to the foregrounding of the human experience in the emerging field of Urban Interaction Design.
Bio:
Ingi Helgason is a research fellow working on the UrbanIxD project based at Edinburgh Napier University where she is also studying part-time towards a PhD in Interaction Design. She teaches technology design and innovation at the Open University and her research interests focus on technology-mediated interactions in public and urban spaces. She was a member of the executive committee of the BCS Create series of interaction design conferences, and was on the programme committee of the BCS HCI conference for 2012. Ingi is on the editorial board of the SpringerOpen Journal of Interaction Science (JoIS). She is one of the organisers of This Happened Edinburgh, a series of events focusing on the stories behind interaction design.
This seminar is part of our ongoing series from researchers in HCI. See here for our current schedule.