Critical making of Public Urban Interfaces: an Approach to Designing Frictional Data

Dashboards

Michiel de Lange (Utrecht University)

WWW.URBANINTERFACES.NET

A Tale of Two Dashboards...

Mattern, Shannon. 2015. “Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard” (2015) https://placesjournal.org/article/mission-control-a-history-of-the-urban-dashboard/.

Valkanova & Beherns. Smart Citizen Sentiment Dashboard http://moritzbehrens.com/2013/scsd_sp/de Lange, Michiel. 2018. "From real-time city to asynchronicity: Exploring the real-time smart city dashboard " In Time for

mapping: Cartographic temporalities, edited by Sybille Lammes, Chris Perkins, Alex Gekker, Sam Hind, Clancy Wilmott and Daniel Evans. Manchester: Manchester University Press. http://oapen.org/search?identifier=650132.

M attern, Shannon. 2015. M ission Contro l: A H istory of the U rban D ashboard. P laces Journa l,

h ttps://p lacesjourna l.org/artic le /m ission-contro l-a-h istory-of-the-urban-dashboard/.

data dashboards as (urban) interfaces

urban dashboards - Platform (1/4)

• physical-digital hybrids: city control rooms• purely web-based platforms

• specific mobile platforms (e.g. for police in the field)

• dedicated IoT devices

urban dashboards - Data (2/4)

• single - composite indicators• descriptive or contextual indicators;

diagnostic, performance and target indicators; predictive and conditional indicators

• standardized and comparable data, situation-specific data

• Nominal data, Ordinal data, Interval data, Ratio data (cf. Kitchin 2014)

• user-generated or collected by private parties

• open source or closed/proprietary data• etc.etc.

urban dashboards - Visualization (3/4)

• charts, graphs, diagrams, maps • indexical interfaces, symbolic interfaces

• fixed and interactive visualizations, dynamically refreshing or cumulative

urban dashboards - Operation (4/4)from…:• accountability of municipality/institution/individual• collecting intelligence• benchmarking and comparison• surveilling and controlling

to….:• democratizing tools for civic empowerment.

frictions

human-centric data

urban frictions

situated interfaces

‘frictional’ public data dashboards

… but how?

critical making“[...] to describe the combination of critical thinking with hands- on-making: a kind pedagogical practice that uses material engagements with technologies to open and extend critical social reflection” (Ratto in Hertz, http://current.ecuad.ca/what-is-critical-making)

“Critical making signals the ways in which productions [...] are understood as politically transformative activities” (Ratto & Boler, DIY Citizenship, 2014)

A Tale of Two Pilots...1) Workshop: “Critical Making of Frictional Urban Interfaces”

Utrecht 6-7 March 2018

7 Steps for ‘dramatizing’ data:

Step 1 - Imagining the story of an urban dataset

Step 2 - Urban friction as plotting device

Step 3 - Situating the urban friction

Step 4 - Making the urban interface

Step 5 - Making public of urban Intervention

A Tale of Two Pilots...

2) Collaborative (EU) research project: “Making Public Urban Interfaces: Designing Frictional Data

Dashboards for EU Smart Citizenship” (in: Utrecht, Aarhus, Ljubljana, Plymouth, Vilnius)

Conclusion: Making + Criticality