Mediated Urbanism: Data, Ubiquitous Digital Sensors and Interactive Screen Media in 21st Century Urban Advertising Practice

Mixed-reality, augmentation technologies and sensor networks enable advertisers to radically re-contextualise the function of physical space as a platform for digital storytelling and advertising innovation. As connected sensors, bio-informatic data capture and pervasive media technologies develop across the built environment, through the expansion of the internet into physical space and things (Internet of Things, Smart Cities), inanimate objects and physical locations will increasingly become an opportunity to extend storytelling and interactive advertising experiences across our urban landscapes.

Through the development of SMART urban infrastructures and the placement of sensors throughout the city, the urban environment increasingly becomes a physical platform, or software, for digitally enhanced augmented experiences. This enables organisations to connect people to stories, spaces and experiences in highly personalised and contextually aware ways. Responsive technology has the capability to give city architectures, and its 'mediatecture', a fluidity and adaptability to its environment to effectively become a dynamic, living and sensing entity within highly personalised flows of urban visuality, sensuality and playability. This has profound implications for the way we think through questions around personal data, our own embodiment within the city and its relationship to the new forms of mediated public and private space emerging in contemporary digital culture.

This PhD is part of a collaboration with McCann Manchester as key partner and supported by the Virtual Engineering Centre (VEC). Key research questions include theorising how contemporary advertisers and media artists are using sensor-based content approaches within location specific contexts and how this is leading to new forms of narrative expression and relations within urban environments. The project will create a theoretical basis for the practice-based elements of the research, which will aim to develop a prototype for forms of interactive, augmented and playable advertising that can be both mass-personalised, made location specific as well as responding to the needs of its stakeholders. Other research questions related to this will address important social and ethical concerns around the gathering and use of personalised data in physical spaces and the design implications of developing sensor networks connected to mediated architectural practice.