CITY MOOD how does your city feel? Luisa Fabrizi Interaction Design One year Master 15 Credits Master Thesis August 2014 Supervisor: Jörn Messeter CITY MOOD how does your city feel? 2 Thesis Project I Interaction Design Master 2014 Malmö University Luisa Fabrizi [email protected] 3 01. INDEX 01. INDEX .................................................................................................................................03 02. ABSTRACT ...............................................................................................................................04 03. INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................................05 04. METHODOLOGY ..............................................................................................................................08 05. THEORETICAL FRamEWORK ...........................................................................................................09 06. DESIGN PROCESS ...................................................................................................................18 07. GENERAL CONCLUSIONS ..............................................................................................................41 08. FURTHER IMPLEMENTATIONS ....................................................................................................44 09. APPENDIX ..............................................................................................................................47 02. ABSTRACT This research aims to make the first step in the direction of creating guidelines to use for building an instrument capable to collect information about citizens’ emotional reaction toward their city. Through the use of an existing mobile application meant to collect data about one’s own emotions I tried to evaluated the availability of people in sharing how they feel. Later on, based on the evaluations of this app, I created two subsequent analog prototypes that can be placed in urban spaces to collect people’s place related emotions. The devices have been used both inside the university and in open urban spaces in Malmö. Using the experiences made with these prototypes, concerning the availability of people in sharing their emotions about spaces, this thesis is used to develop guidelines and design opportunities for fur- ther development of interactive street furniture designed to collect place related emotions. 5 03. INTRODUCTION AGAINST THE TERM SMART CITY In the last years we witnessed the rise of a new and controversial term: smart city; this has become the buzzword politicians, industrials, journalists and urban developers are using with the expectation to convince their public that choices made under the directives of “new” and “smart” are always right and winning; unfortunately very often in our society, the knowledge and critical attitude toward the so called new technologies are scarce and tend to naively and rhetorically divide what is good from what is evil, not understanding that technology is neither moral or amoral, but it is the use that people behind it make that define it as an instrument to empower the society or to threat its freedom. The term smart city is defying itself as a vision of a technological and connected urban environment where distribution, mobility, production and effectiveness are the principal term to define the value and success of the city (Hollands, R. 2008). Of course, this is not a reason to believe that new technolo- gies, when related to the city, are only an instrument of the neoliberal and capitalistic culture; there are other approaches, and they are coming from researchers in the universities, activists and people from all over the world who have seen the power that computation can bring to the collectivity if designed and used the right way. With this paper I am hoping to contribute to this, maybe slightly idealistic, view of what could be done to make our cities better places to live in through the use of digital inter- active design; I do this trying to understand how to use citizens’ emotive reactions to places in the city as a way to explore and understand the urban environment and to produce a discussion about it. HOW DOES YOUR CITY FEEL? I try to propose emotions as a way to trigger a reflection about the city; this seemed to me as a way to obtain input from as many people as possible: not everyone has the capacity to develop an opin- ion about a certain matter, but every person has a personal emotional response to what’s happening around her. Once we have put together different people’s emotional responses to a certain environ- ment they can be collectively discussed leading to a new understanding of that environment and the way it is seen and lived; already in the ‘60s Jane Jacobs states that to understand and to build better cities it’s fundamental to start reasoning from the particular and only then going up to see the general image (Jacobs, J. 1961), having the opportunity to see the way citizen’s emotions are scattered and how they describe different areas of the city could be a way to start a new reasoning about our urban environment basing it on the affective portrait of the community. I am also, somehow, trying to propose on a city scale what design developers and researchers do when they test their designs: they try to understand what kind of emotions are triggered in their testers in order to evaluate what they built and to take decision on how to implement it (Isomursu, M. et al, 2007); cities are as well a matter of design and I think it is finally time to take in account what emo- tions they trigger in their “users”, even if so far, emotions and affect have generally been neglected in the discussions about cities, smart cities and urban environments (de Lange, M, 2013). The kind of research I am going to write about in this paper has to be considered as a first step toward a multifaceted project in the emerging field of Urban Computing that I am intentioned to contribute to in the future; the idea behind this design is to explore in a discrete manner citizen’s feeling about 6 their urban environment and to try to grasp how different portions of the city are seen and experi- enced; the live data collected should be then shown through a thoughtful map based visualization on screen which would need to be open, interactive and diffused through web, mobile systems and screens around the city. Citizens should then be able to interact with this system, comment the results, cross the emotion-data with other data to try to understand if there are patterns that may describe or explain why the city has certain emotional responses, they may as well propose solutions to situation or problem they detected. A project like this may need the financing and support of the government of the city, which should be very open and not invasive in terms of leaving to the citizen the opportunity to comment and add to the website as much as they would; also it should be a government ready to embrace, to try to un- derstand and to answer to citizens’ requests and needs. In this paper I start to explore how the collection of citizen’s emotive responses to the place in the city could be designed and I try to answer to the following questions: What is the right mean to use in order to help people to reflect about the relation between their emo- tions and the place where they are? What kind of interactive instrument could be collectively used in order to gain information about the feelings a certain place triggers in to people. What are the guidelines to follow when designing this kind of interactive system? I began my research expecting to build an embodied mean, an “emotions collector”, two different ways of collecting seemed to be feasible: • a wearable based on a personal mobile application (EmotionSense), • an interactive street furniture. To answer to these questions I proceed first user tested an Android based app for smart-phones called EmotionSense, an emotion tracker, I thought that this would have been a good base to build a wearable; to understand if a wearable was a useful mean to answer to my questions I tested Emotion- Sense on a small number of people, I collected their reactions and idea about it through interviews and a questionnaire. Based on the user tests I found out that this wasn’t a valuable mean for my purpose and I decided to move my research further in the direction of the interactive street furniture. The concept of street fur- niture was introduced by Eric Paulos (2008) and it indicates new structures, that still need to find their shape, meanings and use, that could be used as interactive system part of a participatory urbanistic network. I continued my research building two analogical prototype to try to answer to the aforementioned questions. The first prototype, made out of cardboard, was a poll asking “How are you today?” I placed it around the university’s building, people had to take a paper chosen from six different stacks, each of which had an emoticon representing a different affective state, then they had to place this slip of paper inside the poll. After three days of testing I found that this was an effective solution. I built a second and more complex analogical prototype. This prototype was made out of MDF and plexiglass, and was composed of six different polls, mirroring the six different emotional states. The question asked this time was “How does this place make you feel?”, as I was looking for