One Day Workshop to be held at UbiComp 2004

7th September 2004
Nottingham, England

Full UbiComp in the Urban Frontier Proceedings (PDF)

Participants and Papers

Attendee Paper Title
Aharon Kellerman Wirelessness and urban spatial organization
Yoshito Tobe Converting Crowds of People to Advantage: Application to a Lost and Found System
Yasmine Abbas Neo-nomads and the Nature of the Spaces of Flows
Paul Dourish
Genevieve Bell
Getting Out of the City: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space
Derek Reilly Not in Karlsplatz anyomore: Navigating Cities Together
Andrew Wilson What Will Happen When My Mobile Phone Has a Sense of Smell?
Constance Fleuriot Children at the Urban Frontier
Henrik Jernstrom Placing Ubicomp
John Geraci Community and Boundary in the Age of Mobile Computing
Katrina Jungnickel Ordinary Technology: A Methodological Study of Urban Mobility through a London Routmaster Bus
Sarah Kaufman A Sense of Place: Urban Tourism and Wireless Technology
Timo Arnall Spatial Memory: Marking in Urban Public Space
Chris Beckmann transcate:Navigating Idiosyncratic Urban Transit Practices
Jens Pedersen
Anna Vallgårda
Viability of Urban Social Technologies
Katherine Moriwaki
Jonah Brucker-Cohen
Coincidence and Intersection: Networks and the Crowd
Barry Brown The City Streets
Dan Melinger Privacy's Role in Mobile Social Software for the Urban Community
Anita Wilhelm Zooke: The Camera Phone Game
Michelle Kasprzak The Point and the Path - a Relationship Between Space and Time
Laura Forlano The Myths of Micro-coordination?
Yanna Vogiazou
Bas Raijmakers
Urban space as a playground for large scale group interaction: experiences with CitiTag

Organizers

Eric Paulos ~~ Intel Research Berkeley
Ken Anderson ~~ Intel PaPR
Anthony Townsend ~~ NYU Taub Urban Research Center

Call for Papers (PDF)

Schedule (Tentative)

9:00 910   Welcome
9:10 10:30 Urban 1 (Eight Minute Talks)
  Aharon Kellerman Wirelessness and urban spatial organization
  Yoshito Tobe Converting Crowds of People to Advantage: Application to a Lost and Found System
  Yasmine Abbas Neo-nomads and the Nature of Spaces of Flows
  Paul Dourish Getting Out of the City: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space
  Derek Reilly Not in Karlsplatz anyomore: Navigating Cities Together
  Andrew Wilson What Will Happen When My Mobile Phone Has a Sense of Smell?
  Constance Fleuriot Children at the Urban Frontier
  Henrik Jernstrom Placing Ubicomp
  John Geraci Community and Boundary in the Age of Mobile Computing
  Katrina Jungnickel Ordinary Technology: A Methodological Study of Urban Mobility through a London Routmaster Bus
10:30 11:00 Coffee Break  
11:00 12:30 Urban 2 (Eight Minute Talks)
  Sarah Kaufman A Sense of Place: Urban Tourism and Wireless Technology
  Timo Arnall Spatial Memory: Marking in Urban Public Space
  Chris Beckmann transcate:Navigating Idiosyncratic Urban Transit Practices
  Jens Pedersen Viability of Urban Social Technologies
  Katherine Moriwaki Coincidence and Intersection: Networks and the Crowd
  Barry Brown The City Streets
  Dan Melinger Privacy's Role in Mobile Social Software for the Urban Community
  Aninta Wilhelm Zooke: The Camera Phone Game
  Michelle Kasprzak The Point and the Path - a Relationship Between Space and Time
  Laura Forlano The Myths of Micro-coordination?
  Yanna Vogiazou Urban space as a playground for large scale group interaction: experiences with CitiTag
12:30 1:30 Lunch  
1:30 2:30 Breakout 1  
2:30 3:30 Breakout reportback 1  
3:30 4:00 Coffee Break  
4:00 5:00 Breakout 2  
5:00 5:30 Breakout reportback 2  
5:30 6:00 Wrapup - Next Steps  
     
6:30   Light Buffet Provided  

Scope and Aims

UbiComp in the Urban Frontier is a one day workshop to be held at the 6th Annual Ubiquitous Computing Conference in Nottingham, England.  This workshop will be focused on understand how the rapidly emerging fabric of mobile and wireless computing will influence, disrupt, expand, and be integrated into the social patterns existent within our public urban landscapes.

There is little doubt that laptops, PDAs, and mobile phones have enabled computing to become a truly mobile experience.  With these new computing devices, we emerge from our office, work, and school into the urban fabric of our cities and towns.  We often view these urban areas as “in-between spaces” – obstacles to traverse from one place to another.  However, not only do we spend a significant amount of time in such urban landscapes, but these spaces contribute to our own formulation of identity, community, and self. Much of the richness of life transpires within our own urban settings. Similarly, there is a growing body of work within the field of social computing, particularly those involving social networking such as Tribe, Friendster, and Live Journal. At the intersection of mobile and social computing, we seek to provoke discussion aimed at understanding this emerging space of computing within and across our public urban frontiers.

While toting a laptop around a city may seem a like an example of such city computing, the urban frontiers workshop will be more deeply concerned with addressing several sub-themes, including (but not limited to):

The timing of the Urban Frontiers workshop is aimed at capturing a unique, synergistic moment – expanding urban populations, rapid adoption of Bluetooth mobile devices, and widespread influence of wireless technologies across our urban landscapes. The United Nations has recently reported that 48 percent of the world's population currently live in urban areas and that this number is expected to exceed the 50 percent mark by 2007, thus marking the first time in history that the world will have more urban residents than rural residents. Current studies project Bluetooth-enabled devices to reach 1.4 billion units in 2005 alone. Nearly 400 million new mobile phones are scheduled to be sold worldwide this year alone. WiFi hardware is being deployed at the astonishing rate of one every 4 seconds globally.

We are gathering for an event to expose, deconstruct, and understand the challenges of this newly emerging moment in urban history and its dramatic influence on technology usage and adoption.  We invite position papers on topics related to these themes.

Participation

Selection of workshop participants and presentations will be based on refereed submissions. Authors are invited to submit a two-page position statement in the ACM SIGCHI conference publications format. Position statements are encouraged to be provocative and will be used during the workshop to guide and disrupt our views of the urban frontiers. They may include personal experiences, performances, studies, or individual urban projects.  Position statements should have only one author, and should include a brief biography. 

Please email submissions in PDF format to paulos@intel-research.net no later than 26 July 2004.

Sample Questions and Topics

What do you see as the three most critical issues for the design and adoption of computing across our urban landscapes within the next five years?

What three issues/themes/topics are currently least represented within the discussion of computing within our pubic urban landscapes?

What computing technology areas offer the most potential to improve the lives of people in public urban landscapes?

What is the emotional experience of living in urban places? How would you express it to others?

What are the reasons people choose to live in cities?

Is there a way to break down urban landscapes into sets of in-between spaces? How? Why?

What are other types of in-between spaces? Is there an ordering or hierarchy?

How can an individual stand out within a city? How can they disappear? When would one desire either?

What urban elements are most endangered across urban spaces? What do we want to save? To remove?

What are the 5 most important elements of cities? Why?

What are the 5 most annoying issues/elements of city life? Most pleasant?

Where should technology never be used within a city?

In cities people lead private lives in public places. Are there conflicts with this?

Should we carry the technology or should the city embed it? How?

Who stands to gain the most from technology within cities? To loose the most?

Are there such things as boundaries to public urban places? How can they be measured?

Who is most recognized in cities? Most ignored? Why?

Different cultures, different cities, different lives. How should these issues be addressed? By technology?

Who traverses the most of typical urban landscapes daily? The least?

What cues do we use to interpret place and how will technology re-inform and alter our perception of various places?

Who are the people we share our city with?  How do they influence our urban landscape?

Where do we belong in urban social space and how do new technologies enable and disrupt feelings of community and belonging?

How will buildings, subways, sidewalks, parking meters, and other conventional, physical artifacts on the urban landscape be used and re-appropriated by emerging technology tools? Examples?

How will navigation and movement, either throughout an entire city or within a small urban space, be influenced by the introduction of urban technology?