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Research Cluster 15 explores the complex network of the political, ecological, and cultural protocols offered to the systems of urban design and governance by the emergence of ubiquitous computing.
Our methods are based on an ecological praxis founded on aesthetic assemblages of collaborative rationalities, human and non-human, computational and non-computational. By opening the digital participatory scholarship to ecological and post-humanist theory, the work explores a better understanding of the complex nature of collective feedback, creating the potential for the affirmation of novel urban narratives and aesthetics.
This year five sites were selected amongst London’s most popular outdoor destinations and explored with an approach that examined the correlations between large public datasets and the granularity of environmental and biometric sensing. Our investigations mapped sensual and emotive readings of urban space collating quantitative and qualitative information.
The results offered a series of partly digital partly physical, transcalar and transindividual platforms, designed as ecological and heterogeneous assemblages, a confederation of human and non-human, computational and non-computational elements collaborating and interacting as vital and pervasive matter. Constructed as collaborative cognitive infrastructures our designs engaged with ideas of mixed realities, multiverses, and decentralised worlds catering beyond human needs to challenge the boundaries of the ordinary notion of public space.