Antti Juustila (working with the IPCity at the University of Oulu Finland) participated the Imaging the City workshop, a part of the CHI 2007 conference. The one day workshop focused on the city as a special place for human-computer interation research and practice. The workshop explored the practices and technologies of imaging the urban environment, bringing together designers, HCI experts, urban planners and technologists.

The issues handled at the workshop ranged from how do we represent the city in HCI, what kind of technological devices, services and platforms support imaging the city now and in the future, and how these representations can be used for social and political ends. Also new methods for developing the technologies were discussed, along with the issues of what ca we learn from urban experience to design stronger representations and interfaces within HCI research and practice.

The workshop papers are listed in this website: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/cdisalvo/chi2007workshop/papers.html, including our paper on the experiment using surveillance cameras to enhance the experience of the architectural design site in the design studio, conducted as part of the Studio’n’Site and IPCity research projects at our department. The papers addressed the workshop topic in a very wide scale, ranging from mobile tools which “seeks to articulate the performative relations between places and identities”, evaluating the popularity of an area by statistical analysis of online map usage to “method for mapping the inter-relationship of space, social and informational networks that increasingly co-exist in our cities”.

The actual workshop did not include presentations of the papes, but instead group work and common sessions, drawing together the topics handled in the group assignments and discussing the outcomes of the group work.

At the end of the workshop we discussed interesting future research topics on the imaging the city. We identified the following topics for research:

• time, scales of time, representing temporality, also using sound, not only visual media
• using comics in imaging time
• film was not discussed in the workshop (only pictures), which was a bit of a surprise, considering that film is an important media for (at least some) architects
• The importance of situatedness: light/day; sun/rain/fog,…
• private spaces and interiors in imaging the city?
• soundscapes, including sound in representation
• construction of interpretations of the site; how would the space address us; talk to us with signs, symbols, audio,…
• cycles of renewal, evolution of cities, degeneration of cities
• many times a missing element in current research: people and conflict (not necessary violent) — how to design, not hide/ignore conflicts & conflicting views and debate (e.g. park renewal and homeless people)
• embeddedness of research: go in and engage, not just shortly but long term engagement

In summary, the workshop was very interesting also from the viewpoint of the IPCity, us focusing on some of the issues mentioned above.