The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown meant a greatly reduced social and economic activity. Sound is of major importance to people’s perception of the environment, and some remarked that the soundscape was changing for the better. But are these anecdotal reports based in truth? Has traffic noise from cars and airplanes really gone down, so that more birdsong can be heard? Have socially distanced people quietened down? This article presents a case study of the human perception of environmental sounds in an urban neighborhood in the Basque Country between 15 March and 25 May 2020. The social restrictions imposed through national legislation divided the 69-day period into three phases. We collected observations, field audio recordings, photography, and diary notes on 50 days. Experts in soundscape and architecture were presented with the recordings, in randomized order, and made two separate perceptual analyses. One group (N = 11) rated the recordings for pleasantness and eventfulness using an adapted version of the Swedish Soundscape Quality Protocol, and a partly overlapping group (N = 12) annotated perceived sound events with free-form semantic labels. The labels were systematically classified into a four-level Taxonomy of Sound Sources, allowing an estimation of the relative amounts of Natural, Human, and Technological sounds. Loudness and three descriptors developed for bioacoustics were extracted computationally. Analysis showed that Eventfulness, Acoustic Complexity, and Acoustic Richness increased significantly over the time period, while the amount of Technological sounds decreased. These observations were interpreted as reflecting changes in people’s outdoor activities and behavior over the whole 69-day period, evidenced in an increased presence of Human sounds of voices and walking, and a significant shift from motorized vehicles toward personal mobility devices, again evidenced by perceived sounds. Quantitative results provided a backdrop against which qualitative analyses of diary notes and observations were interpreted in relation to the restrictions and the architectural specifics of the site. An integrated analysis of all sources pointed at the temporary suspension of human outdoor activity as the main reason for such a change. In the third phase, the progressive return of street life and the usage of personal mobility vehicles seemed to be responsible for a clear increase in Eventfulness and Loudness even in the context of an overall decrease of Technological sounds. Indoor human activity shared through open windows and an increased presence of birdsong emerge as a novel characteristic element of the local urban soundscape. We discuss how such changes in the acoustic environment of the site, in acoustic measurements and as perceived by humans, point toward the soundscape being a crucial component of a comprehensive urban design strategy that aims to improve health and quality of life for increasingly large and dense populations in the future.
What for and how will we design children's technologies in the transhumanism age, and what stance will we take as designers? This paper aims to answer this question with 13 fictional abstracts from sixteen authors of different countries, institutions and disciplines. Transhumanist thinking envisions enhancing human body and mind by blending human biology with technological augmentations. Fundamentally, it seeks to improve the human species, yet the impacts of such movement are unknown and the implications on children's lives and technologies were not explored deeply. In an age, where technologies can clearly be defined as transhumanist, such as under-skin chips or brain-machine interfaces, our aim is to reveal probable pitfalls and benefits of those technologies on children's' lives by using the power of design fiction.
Green Infrastructure (GI) has gained importance in recent years as it has been revealed as an essential piece to face the environmental problem generated by the incessant growth of urbanization, loss of biodiversity, and climate change. In this vein, the results of a research aimed at investigating the challenges posed by the implementation of the GI in the usual compact urban spaces in the cities of the Mediterranean area are presented, based on the analysis of indicators on green spaces in the Spanish city of Pamplona. A comparative analysis of the indicators (green spaces and trees) in the city’s neighbourhoods using GIS tools reveals the high intra-urban inequalities as well as the existence of, particularly, underfunded areas. The morphological analysis of one of the underfunded spaces (La Milagrosa neighbourhood) also shows that the narrowness of the road and the shortage of green spaces constitute obstacles that must be addressed from the planning tools of the GI. The results allow us to reflect on the importance of the scale of analysis in the planning processes of the UGI (Urban Green Infrastructure) and on neighbourhood the suitability of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) as an alternative for the design and implementation of the UGI.
By 2050, the UN (United Nations) expects the number of city dwellers to reach 6.3 billion and the balance of humans in cities to rise to about 70%. At the same time, the vertiginous development of information technologies opens up a new world of possibilities to improve the quality of life of citizens. Our research is focused on the possibilities of work in the urban design and public realm that these new information technologies are starting to open up. Based on the concept of urban acupuncture and on the so called u-pad methodology, we create a network of interactive and adaptive points that put together the three fields of technology, design and emotion to create information and activation points on the city. The prototypes of the Birloki system BL1-r01-tp01 and BL1-r01-tp02 are already built and being tested to be operative in the streets of Bilbao (Spain) as a first testbed. The project deploys seven Level 1 (BL1) and 10-12 Level 2 Birloki points over the Old Town (the medieval centre of the modern city (in Spanish: Casco Viejo)), focusing on residents and visitors. They will convey and collect information and data and interact with the users, utilizing combinability, interactive devices, augmented reality, i-beacon technology and others. These data can be collected and re-input in the flow to improve the system and therefore the experience of the user/citizen.
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