Understanding and Representing the Social Prospects of Hybrid Urban Spaces

Abstract

As built environments become increasingly hybrid physical, social, and digital spaces, the intersecting issues of spatial context, sociality, and pervasive digital technologies need to be understood when designing for interactions in these hybrid spaces. Architectural and interaction designers need a mechanism that provides them with an understanding of the ‘sociality-places-bits' nexus. Using a specific urban setting as an analytical case study, we present a methodology to capture this nexus in a form that designers of hybrid spaces can effectively apply as a tool to augment digitally sociality in a built environment.

Learning from new millennium science fiction cities

“…Works such as Nezar AlSayyad's Hybrid Urbanism (2001), J. Hou's paper 'Hybrid Landscapes: Towards an Inclusive Ecological Urbanism on Seattle's Central Waterfront' (Hou 2007), 'Understanding and Representing the Social Prospects of Hybrid Urban Spaces' by Paay, Bharat, and Howard (2007), Architectural Design's interview of Steven Holl, 'Holl on Hybrids' (Jefferson 2005), and the 262 twenty-first-century articles found by searching 'hybrid(*)' in the Avery Index to architectural periodicals attest to designers' interest in cultural hybrids such as 'Chinatowns,' mixed ancient and current building technologies, and urban biotic systems. Perdido Street Station and Windup Girl are in many aspects studies in hybridity that revolve around hybrid creatures and places.…”

Data Matter(s): Legitimacy, Coding, and Qualifications-of-Life

“…Perhaps signaling a departure in thinking around`cyberspace', pervasive or ubiquitous computing marks the digital infrastructures that are present in everyday life (as opposed to the supposedly immaterial spaces of virtual reality). This emerging research examines designed interactions in the urban (Dave, 2007;McCullough, 2007), broadband development in the city (Townsend, 2007), mobility (Dodge and Kitchin, 2004), and the digital augmenting of sociality in urban space (de Souza e Silva, 2006;Paay et al, 2007). In their work on air transportation, Budd and Adey (2009) suggest that the interplay between the real/present and the digital/virtual demands our rethinking of software practices, that the code-work of everyday life is both physical and immaterial.…”

From Abstraction to Being There: Mixed Reality at the Early Stages of Design

“…Our previous research in the field of design representations has explored the potential of hybrid approaches to support design conception and review.These have included using videogame technology to develop collaborative virtual environments, [1] the social aspects of hybrid urban spaces [2] and mixed media in the design studio, informed by the concept of digital craft. [3] Mixed reality technology that combines real time context with digital models, offer the potential to further this research agenda.…”