Katharine Willis send us an announcement for this interesting event:
Remediating Urban Space Symposium
Remediating Urban Space: Exploring Design Responses
Wednesday 6th June 2012
10.00– 16.30
Plymouth University, Plymouth, UK
Keynote: Mark Shepard, University of Buffalo
Communication technologies remediate everyday urban life, resulting in subtle shifts in the spatial, temporal, scalar and material processes which are ‘all too often overlooked in conventional and binary approaches opposing the ‘virtual’ realm of new technologies to ‘real’ urban places’ (Crang 2007). We need to move beyond an artificially created dichotomy of a real and a virtual world as if the two were opposed. Instead, we must develop a new understanding of our activities and behaviour in the spaces of the city; since online and mobile socially networked spaces and real-world places are connecting and converging in numerous and complex ways. The challenge before us is finding ways to engage with these changes as designers. The aim of the workshop is to consider more fully the multiple, subtle, and interdependent spatio-temporalities which together work to constitute ICT-based urban change. How do we start to create meaningful spaces that merge digital and physical interactions?
The workshop will examine and propose design responses for how to remediate urban space through a range of ICT’s, locative media and smart objects. It will draw on an interdisciplinary field of architecture, human computer interaction, geography, media studies, art and sociology to explore questions of how urban space can be conceived and inhabited when it is mediated, and the nature of these mediated experiences at an everyday level. Contributions will be a mix of ideas/projects and case studies. There will be three main themes/workshops:
Workshop 1: Chair: Ava Fatah, UCL – Urban screens, urban public space and sense of community
Workshop 2: Chair: Chris Speed, Edinburgh College of Art – The ‘internet of things’, social memory and networked objects
Workshop 3: Chair Alex Aurigi, Plymouth University – Urban Design, public place-making and regeneration in the information age
The aim of the workshop is to discuss current work, future developments and explore the issues associated with understanding, engaging with and designing for future spaces. Selected work and papers will be published in a Special Issue of a Journal. There will be an exhibition of project work presented in the School of Architecture and will be documented in a printed catalogue.
There will be no registration fee, but in order to participate please send a short abstract outlining your proposed topic and a short outline of your research interests (max. 500 words) to:
Katharine Willis, School of Architecture, Plymouth University: katharine.willis ** plymouth.ac.uk.
Deadline for Abstract Submissions: 15th May 2012