Exploring the potential of networked urban screens for communities and culture

This project brings together University College London, the University of Nottingham, which also hosts the HORIZON Digital Economy Hub, the London Borough of Waltham Forest, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) and Leytonstone Business Improvement District (e11bid) to investigate how the urban experience mediated through connected large screens can be designed to augment real world interactions, support communities, and promote and develop culture so as to maximise the quality of the public experience within the urban realm.This project is inherently cross-disciplinary bringing together methods from Architecture and Computer Science. We will work in 'action research' mode engaging research organisations with the end user communities and Waltham Forest council. We will also engage at a national level through the involvement of CABE and Mike Gibbons, Head of Live Sites (a network of permanent large-scale digital screens across the UK). Through an iterative prototyping methodology we will integrate the content development, placement, local interactivity and distributed connectivity of four re-locatable screen nodes connecting Nottingham with London. This set-up will allow us to explore remote connectivity by comparing two with three and four networked nodes, creating situations and experiences that differ in their urban settings and the types of populations they support through different seasons. The screen content will be compared across different locations, allowing us to identify outcomes that are site-specific and ones that can be generalised across different sites. We will develop the screen content (such as applications and experience) and evaluate mediated public interactions around these screens by engaging with the London Borough of Waltham Forest, the local communities around all four nodes locations, and commissioned artists in definition of the research challenges as well as in the programme of research itself. These creative experiments will, however, be carefully designed to contribute to our research understanding of the dimensions of possibility and acceptance by the community. We will document design, management and public meetings and, as research results are generated, feed research findings back into local and policy debate, and feed forward into the design of the experience and interactions mediated through connected screen technologies. Our research takes a targeted and longitudinal approach in order to understand a complex range of social, technical and interactional issues.

Non-academic impact is fundamentally embedded in the structure of the funding call and our resulting research strategy. The London Borough of Waltham Forest is the core stakeholder partner which will enable our Research-in-the-Wild driven research programme through the public deployment of the urban screen network. The district of Woolwich in the London Borough of Greenwich Council is an additional supporting public sector partner, providing research input and aiming to help disseminate the results. The project's Advisory Board will play an important role in ensuring meaningful impact takes place in an iterative process whereby the insights of the project research are fed back to potential end users and revised as necessary. Pathways to impact will be considered for the following groups: the general public as inhabitants of urban space, screen managers and curators and content creators, the management of urban space at councils, designers of urban space and planners, community leaders and policy makers, and finally the research associates employed on the grant. The general public - Inhabitants of urban space including local and connected communities: Our emphasis on participative community engagement as a specific objective based on a framework of action research will result in iterative experiments, observation and documentation to engage the public and local community. This will contribute innovatively to the current debate on the potential of urban screens for serving as an exchange platform between people in a range of cities supporting novel forms of social interactions. Content creators and Artists - people making content for urban screens: We are committed to engage Christian Nold as Artist in Residence. Christian Nold is an artist, designer and educator working to develop new participatory models and technologies for communal representation. His involvement will not only allow for creative engagement of community members, but will also provide a pathway to impact. Managers of urban space - Town centre management at council(s): The project will generate an increased understanding of how the urban experience (mediated through connected urban screens) can be designed to augment real world interactions, support communities, and promote culture. This will be achieved by embedding multidisciplinary research directly within the community. Participating authorities will benefit from learning how such screens perform through different seasons, how they work in conjunction with surrounding uses within and near to a space, and how they may be used in respect to major events either of national or local significance, such as sporting fixtures or mass participation cultural events. Designers of urban space, and planning regulators: The project outcomes will be of direct relevance to those involved in designing new urban screen implementations, whether they are designers themselves or public bodies that advise those designers. This is particularly timely as urban screens are often considered as parts of regeneration strategies for urban renewal. The Research Associates employed on the grant: The research project will have a positive effect on the staff development and research careers of the three research associates employed on the grant. Pathways to Impact are inherent to the structure of the bid as already highlighted at the beginning. In particular, we will channel impact through CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment), the HORIZON DEH offering access to over 100 commercial partners. This will be complemented by dissemination in non-academic magazines and journal as well as the attendance at relevant Urban Screen gatherings.