Marcus Foth

CityFlocks: designing social navigation for urban mobile information systems

CityFlocks is a mobile system enabling visitors and new residents in a city to tap into the knowledge and experiences of local residents, so as to gather information about their new environment. Its design specifically aims to lower existing barriers of access and facilitate social navigation in urban places. This paper presents a design case study of a mobile system prototype that offers an easy way for information seeking new residents or visitors to access tacit knowledge from local people about their new community. In various user tests we evaluate two general user interaction alternatives - direct and indirect social navigation - and analyse under what conditions which interaction method works better for people using a mobile device to socially navigate urban environments. The outcomes are relevant for the user interaction design of future mobile information systems that leverage off of a social navigation approach.

Applications and implementations of new media in corporate communications: An action research approach

Advances in new media and web technology are making it easier for organizations and their employees, suppliers, customers and stakeholders to participate in the creation and management of content. It is therefore, useful to understand how a corporate communication strategy can leverage these trends. Purpose; this paper discusses the take-up and use of new media in organizations, highlighting a current approach to implementation issues. Methodology/approach; we review and explore new media in organizations from three ecological layers: the social, discursive and technical, addressing who is communicating, the communication content and new media technology used. Findings; the paper recommends a customer-centered approach to implementing new media adoption in organisations using action research. Practical implications; new media and Web 2.0 services can be employed to work in tandem with conventional communication tools such as phone, fax and corporate intranets. Such a hybrid approach enables organizations to maintain and strengthen existing stakeholder relationships, but also reach out and build relationships with new stakeholders who were previously inaccessible or invisible. Research limitations/implications; academic literature is lagging behind the pace of technological change, and evaluation studies are limited.

Networked Individualism of Urban Residents: Discovering the communicative ecology in inner-city apartment buildings

Certain patterns of interaction between people point to networks as an adequate conceptual model to characterize some aspects of social relationships mediated or facilitated by information and communication technology. Wellman proposes a shift from groups to networks and describes the ambivalent nature inherent in an egocentric yet still well-connected portfolio of sociability with the term ‘networked individualism’. In this paper, qualitative data from an action research study of social networks of residents in three inner-city apartment buildings in Australia are used to provide empirical grounding for the theoretical concept of networked individualism. However, this model focuses on network interaction rather than collective interaction. The authors propose ‘communicative ecology’ as a concept which integrates the three dimensions of ‘online and offline’, ‘global and local’ as well as ‘collective and networked’. They present their research on three layers of interpretation (technical, social and discursive) to deliver a rich description of the communicative ecology they found, that is, the way residents negotiate membership, trust, privacy, reciprocity, permeability and social roles in person-to-person mediated and direct relationships. They find that residents seamlessly traverse between online and offline communication; local communication and interaction maintains a more prominent position than global or geographically dispersed communication; and residents follow a dual approach which allows them to switch between collective and networked interaction depending on purpose and context.

Motivating domestic energy conservation through comparative, community-based feedback in mobile and social media

The progress of technology has led to the increased adoption of energy monitors among household energy consumers. While the monitors available on the market deliver real-time energy usage feedback to the consumer, the format of this data is usually unengaging and mundane. Moreover, it fails to address consumers with different motivations and needs to save and compare energy. This paper presents a study that seeks to provide initial indications for motivation-specific design of energy-related feedback. We focus on comparative feedback supported by a community of energy consumers. In particular, we examine eco-visualisations, temporal self-comparison, norm comparison, one-on-one comparison and ranking, whereby the last three allow us to explore the potential of socialising energy-related feedback. These feedback types were integrated in EnergyWiz -- a mobile application that enables users to compare with their past performance, neighbours, contacts from social networking sites and other EnergyWiz users. The application was evaluated in personal, semi-structured interviews, which provided first insights on how to design motivation-related comparative feedback.

Facilitating Social Networking in Inner-City Neighborhoods

The success of new social networking systems for residents of inner-city neighborhoods depends on the softwares ability to animate and support meaningful interaction proximate users, to network serendipitous social encounters, and to seamlessly with the way interaction takes place in existing urban social networks

People, content, location: sweet spotting urban screens for situated engagement

A growing body of research is looking at ways to bring the processes and benefits of online deliberation to the places they are about and in turn allow a larger, targeted proportion of the urban public to have a voice, be heard, and engage in questions of city planning and design. Seeking to take advantage of the civic opportunities of situated engagement through public screens and mobile devices, our research informed a public urban screen content application DIS that we deployed and evaluated in a wide range of real world public and urban environments. For example, it is currently running on the renowned urban screen at Federation Square in Melbourne. We analysed the data from these user studies within a conceptual framework that positions situated engagement across three key parameters: people, content, and location. We propose a way to identify the sweet spot within the nexus of these parameters to help deploy and run interactive systems to maximise the quality of the situated engagement for civic and related deliberation purposes.

The Second Life of urban planning? Using NeoGeography tools for community engagement

The majority of the worlds citizens now live in cities. Although urban planning can thus be thought of as a field with significant ramifications on the human condition, many practitioners feel that it has reached the crossroads in thought leadership between traditional practice and a new, more participatory and open approach. Conventional ways to engage people in participatory planning exercises are limited in reach and scope. At the same time, socio-cultural trends and technology innovation offer opportunities to re-think the status quo in urban planning. NeoGeography introduces tools and services that allow non-geographers to use advanced geographical information systems. Similarly, is there a potential for the emergence of a neo-planning paradigm in which urban planning is carried out through active civic engagement aided by Web 2.0 and new media technologies thus redefining the role of practicing planners? This paper traces a number of evolving links between urban planning, NeoGeography and information and communication technology. Two significant trends – participation and visualisation – with direct implications for urban planning are discussed. Combining advanced participation and visualisation features, the popular virtual reality environment Second Life is then introduced as a test bed to explore a planning workshop and an integrated software event framework to assist narrative generation. We discuss an approach to harness and analyse narratives using virtual reality logging to make transparent how users understand and interpret proposed urban designs.

Libraries as coworking spaces: Understanding user motivations and perceived barriers to social learning

Purpose – This paper aims to inform design strategies for smart space technology to enhance libraries as environments for coworking and informal social learning. The focus is on understanding user motivations, behaviour, and activities in the library when there is no programmed agenda.Design/methodology/approach – The study analyses gathered data over five months of ethnographic research at The Edge – a “bookless” library space at the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, that is explicitly dedicated to coworking, social learning, peer collaboration, and creativity around digital culture and technology.Findings – The results present five personas that embody peoples main usage patterns as well as motivations, attitudes, and perceived barriers to social learning. It appears that most users work individually or within pre‐organised groups, but usually do not make new connections with co‐present, unacquainted users. Based on the personas, four hybrid design dimensions are suggested to improve ...

Network action research

Current literature stresses the significance of networks and network theory in both social as well as technical domains. Not only is the role of networked technologies (such as mobile phones and the internet) in everyday life being scrutinized, but network theory is re-shaping an understanding of how social change and community interaction occurs. In this article, I build on these developments to propose network action research as a methodological variant of the action research family. I propose that network action research is a timely and appropriate research methodology to guide studies that involve people, place and technology and to meet the challenges that stem from the changing nature of community interaction and social formations within a network society. I outline how technology can be used to operationalize and support network action research. Examples from two case studies are used to illustrate key aspects of the methodology.

Designing participation in agile ridesharing with mobile social software

Growing participation is a key challenge for the viability of sustainability initiatives, many of which require enactment at a local community level in order to be effective. This paper undertakes a review of technology assisted carpooling in order to understand the challenge of designing participation and consider how mobile social software and interface design can be brought to bear. It was found that while persuasive technology and social networking approaches have roles to play, critical factors in the design of carpooling are convenience, ease of use and fit with contingent circumstances, all of which require a use-centred approach to designing a technological system and building participation. Moreover, the reach of technology platform-based global approaches may be limited if they do not cater to local needs. An approach that focuses on iteratively designing technology to support and grow mobile social ridesharing networks in particular locales is proposed. The paper contributes an understanding of HCI approaches in the context of other designing participation approaches.