Apps for Citizenship, Health, and City Life

8 grudnia br. na University of California w Berkeley odbędzie się konferencja Apps for Citizenship, Health, and City Life from the Social Apps Lab at CITRIS , podczas której projekt „DNA Miasta” zaprezentuje szef zespołu,  Artur Celiński. W konferencji weźmie również udział Kacper Pobłocki, który jest członkiem zespołu badawczego.

Zachęcamy do zapoznania się z projektem Social Apps Lab at CITRIS oraz ze szczegółami dotyczącymi konferencji.

Zobacz program konferencji.

 The Digital We at the Social Apps Lab

Thursday, 8 December 2011, Sutardja Dai Hall

The Social Apps Lab focuses on creating mobile applications that use elements of game play to motivate citizen learning, civic action, and crowdsourced solutions for social problems. The Digital We examines the premises, prospects, and projects of this kind of social media production through a day of workshops and public discussions. The workshops consider research, design, and organizational structures to create apps for citizenship, city life, and health. At mid-day, the directors of the Social Apps Lab will present several new projects, including citysandbox.com, denguetorpedo.com, Pathways, and bingotype.com.

The workshops are intended to focus the kind of research and design necessary to produce applications that encourage a democratic revitalization of citizenship, city life, and health. The Social Apps Lab works with four research agendas, which form the basis of the workshop discussions. The first promotes an active collaboration between the social sciences, computer sciences, engineering, and humanities. This collaboration fosters creative advantages for developing mobile media technologies and game-play to address urban social issues.

The second agenda is to create a feedback loop of urban research through gameplay, that is, to design mobile games that engage players in investigating their city to solve game challenges. Thus, the Lab designs urban detection apps that, for example, get players to explore cities on foot, report on pollutants, eliminate disease vectors, and travel the historical layerings of time and space at specific urban sites.

The third agenda of the Lab’s research is that such game-driven explorations must have both practical and critical results: if they get people to exercise by walking, they do so in modes that challenge them to re-evaluate their assumptions and routines of city life.

The fourth agenda is to evaluate ethically and politically the many kinds of metrics that players generate using mobile applications that reveal scientifically significant patterns of behavior, expose environmental conditions, produce information critical to democratic initiatives, and engage important questions about the monitoring and use of signature digital data.

About the Social Apps Lab at CITRIS

The Social Apps Lab at CITRIS, UC Berkeley, was created in 2010 by Professor James Holston (Anthropology) and Professor Greg Niemeyer (Art Practice and New Media Studies). The Lab focuses on the potential of cell phones and other mobile locative media to harness the participatory energies of game-play to address social issues. It develops this potential through initiatives in research, teaching, and application design. Its objective is to produce mobile and web apps that generate new opportunities for urban research, citizen participation, and critical knowledge. Its work is interdisciplinary and supported at Berkeley by the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), the Division of Social Sciences, and the Division of Arts and Humanities. During the past year, the Lab has focused on designing apps for healthcare, city life, and participatory citizenship.