The Urban Atmospheres project is exploring how people who live in cities might want to use technology, how it could help them develop a sense of community or belonging, or play into their emotional experiences of urban living. By gaining a better understanding of what matters most to people in the daily experience of city life, we hope to inspire useful new technologies for urban dwellers, perhaps unlike any we have seen before. We believe this is an ideal time for our research, because of the growth in urban populations; rapid expansion of ad hoc sensor networks and mobile devices with Bluetooth* wireless technology; and proliferation of wireless technologies.

Urban Computing research project [WMV 4MB]

Part of our research involves urban probes. These are provocative interventions designed to engage people in direct discussions about their current and emerging public urban landscape-and in the process, reveal new opportunities for technology in urban spaces. For example, as part of Jetsam, an urban probe into public city trashcans, we distributed more than 100 self-addressed stamped postcards, with individual stories on them, around San Francisco. We recorded where we dropped each postcard, then waited to see how they were returned to us, what kinds of messages people left on them, and how people interacted with them.

From the Jetsam study we exposed an active curiosity towards trash and the people who once owned it. Ultimately, the study revealed that a seemingly banal, yet ubiquitous, part of the urban infrastructure is actually a focus of rich human activity, a microcosm of social ecology. It influenced our final interactive trashcan design by focusing it more heavily on the use of digital technologies to reinterpret the social archaeology, presence, and movement of people and artifacts throughout the city while provoking and facilitating a public discourse about such patterns and flows.

We've been conducting urban probes and developing prototype applications for nearly two years now, and our research is being presented at key conferences in 2005. The Urban Probes research with Tom Jenkins was presented at ACM SIGCHI. We also presented a position paper for a two-day workshop at the same SIGCHI conference on Engaging the City. I'm happy to be co-organizing with Ken Anderson and Michele Chang of Intel's People and Practices Research group, and Anthony Burke, on the architecture faculty of UC Berkeley, another two-day workshop on urban computing at this year's Ubiquitous Computing conference.

In addition, I'm serving as the committee chair for the Interactive City, one of four major sections of ISEA 2006, the International Symposium on Electronic Art. The Interactive City focuses on projects that can transform the new technologies of mobile and pervasive computing, ubiquitous networks, and location-based media into experiences that matter to city dwellers. We argue for an approach to urban computing that encourages a more divergent brainstorming style - explicitly away from the dominant research themes that continuously promote efficiency and productivity. We want to embrace the full scope of urban life with all of its emotions and experiences.

We can't achieve our research goals in isolation. To gain a deep understanding of what people in urban spaces might need or want in terms of technology requires insights of researchers in the fields of urban planning, architecture, sociology, anthropology, art, design and other domains related to urban living. We have been spending a lot of time building relationships with these professionals. Specifically, we held a small symposium called Street Talk in 2004 to build this diverse community. Since then we have furthered our relationship with Anthony Burke and have initiated work with Ben Hooker of the Royal College of Art, who is a visiting faculty at Intel Research Berkeley for the summer of 2005. We will be holding a follow-up to Street Talk, called Metapolis, in October 2005.

*Bluetooth is a trademark owned by its proprietor and used by Intel Corporation under license