The Figmentum Project: Appropriating Information and Communication Technologies to Animate Our Urban Fabric

Introduction

This chapter explores how we may design site specific information and communication technologies (ICTs) to foster community sentiment. It focuses explicitly on possibilities for ICTs to create new modalities of place through exploring key factors such as shared experiences, shared knowledge and shared authorship. Modalities of place refer to the process by which numerous social, cultural, functional and emotional operators shape individual comprehension of place (Sandin, 2003). To contextualise this discussion in a real world setting, this chapter presents Figmentum, a situated generative art application that was developed for and installed in a new urban development. Figmentum aims to trigger emotional and representational imagined communities. Unlike many current community based urban informatics projects that take the form of online community notice boards, user profiles and the like, Figmentum is a non-service based application. Instead of service-based ICT applications, our research focuses on the emotional and highly intangible cognitive processes that contribute to imaginings of community solidarity. It also emphasises the need for community based ICTs to provide motivating factors for social interaction within communities. An evaluation of Figmentum reveals the critical need for place-based ICT applications to be custom designed to suit the social, cultural, spatial, technical and temporal characteristics of individual sites to successfully augment experiences of place. Although this field is in its infancy, it is clear that new ICT applications have the potential to be valuable tools for animating our urban fabric. This chapter works towards a theory for designing creative place-based applications that may provide enriched experiences within a community.

To design applications that may foster urban communities we must first work from within a framework of understanding peoples’ relationships to place. To construct this framework, this chapter explores the notions of place attachment, imagined communities and social capital. This chapter then examines how social, cultural, functional and emotional operators contribute to experiences or ‘modalities’ of place. Understanding how modalities of place are constructed with these operators allows us to embed the knowledge developed from our framework into the process of designing and implementing community based ICTs. As such the chapter moves on to discuss the process of combining the core values derived from this theoretical framework with design principles drawn from existing community based ICT projects to design Figmentum. In conclusion, a summary of how Figmentum was received by the community and an analysis of the research outcomes is presented, followed by recommendations for future research.

Figure 1.

Background

This study helps to gauge the capacity for ICTs to foster community sentiment and social capital. It approaches the field with the perspective that significant research is still required to explore and define the potentials of ICTs and to establish processes for designing and implementing interventions to satisfy these potentials. The Australian Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts supports this standpoint noting, “There is vast potential to use ICT to build social capital and contribute to community development and formation. However, […] it is largely untapped and unrecognised in many areas. For ICT use to move beyond bonding – to harness its power for bridging and linking to resources that enhance economic and social development – it needs more attention to the type of social capital being developed” (DCITA, 2005, p. 9).