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November 1-3 2007
Student Activities Centre
Temple University Main Campus
The Philadelphia Wireless Project
promises to deliver affordable broadband wireless services to citizens in all
areas of the city. It is the largest project of its kind in the world and may
transform the urban landscape of the City of Philadelphia by enhancing the lives
of community neighborhoods and overcoming the digital divide. Temple University
has partnered with the City of Philadelphia to envision how a broadband wireless
network can transform the lives and experiences of its citizens and visitors
alike. The Philadelphia Wireless Project provides a source of inspiration for
novel ideas as well as a living laboratory for examining new applications. Bill
Mitchell, Professor and Director MIT Media Lab Smart Cities, will keynote the
conference and set the stage.
Cities-arguably the most ambitious and successful of humankind's design
achievements-have become mired in problems like accidents, crime, poverty,
traffic and pollution. Despite the advancements in society at large, a
significant portion of urban residents have been left behind. The emergence of
digital technology gives us a chance to re-shape the landscape of the urban
community. We have the opportunity, as well as responsibility, to design this
emerging digital urban environment right, so that it benefits people in all
walks of life. It requires the creation of both a large-scale information
infrastructure that will cut through existing physical and social
infrastructures in the city and the design of new services and applications. It
also requires new media both in form and function that can take advantage of the
mobility and the ubiquity of information. It forces us to re-think the meanings
of familiar activities, while at the same time it allows us to envision novel
forms of social interactions. It demands new forms of partnership between public
and private sectors, researchers and practice, and the social and technical
realms. The digital urban community, then, is a socio-technical innovation space
where new forms of digitally mediated social interactions are designed and the
meanings of old social interactions are re-shaped and mediated through new
technologies.
The Designing Digital Communities Workshop
The workshop organized by the Institute for Business and
Information Technology, Fox School of Business, Temple University will be the
first in a series of activities that will bring together leading academics and
practitioners to analyze, design and describe ways to transform urban
communities. Designers, architects, technologists, artists, policymakers,
engineers and entrepreneurs will join academics in management, economics,
architecture, communication, history and sociology to identify visionary design
scenarios and narratives of future digital urban communities. The participants
will look for examples, images, stories and vocabularies that can inspire both
research and practice going forward. The workshop will:
- consider how a ubiquitous information infrastructure can transform everyday
experiences
- explore design challenges in realizing the vision of a digital community, and
- influence the transformation of an urban community through the use of
technology.
 The Design Challenge
Design is positioned as a central theme in bringing together diverse
perspectives that are necessary to realizing the vision of digital urban
environments. Through the power of the design attitude the world can be made
better by bringing entrepreneurial and technical knowledge together with the
advances in digital technologies. Design thinking balances technical and
engineering excellence with humanistic values, and rational analysis with
aesthetic judgment. Design thinking can solve existing problems, but also evoke
new images of urban life experiences, new social institutions and partnerships,
and new models of value in our lives.
The workshop will take the everyday experience of Philadelphia residents and
visitors as the point of departure for design inquiry. We will focus on three
groups: residents in center city including underprivileged residents, commuters,
and visitors. Participants will envision new technology, services, business
models, and research projects that can enhance the everyday experience of one of
these three groups by taking advantage of a citywide broadband wireless
infrastructure.
Each attendee will write a short statement (c.a. 500-1000 words) that addresses
a critical aspect of transforming everyday life as experienced by one of the
three target populations. These statements will offer a basis for intensive
discussion. Participants will be divided into small groups, each focusing on one
of the four target populations. Small group discussions will be punctuated with
plenary sessions for open dialogue and a keynote.
Participants
The workshop is by invitation only and will include leading practitioners,
innovators and entrepreneurs who are thinking about the state of the art digital
technology, as well as leading academics in related fields. We will provide
hotel and food. There is no registration fee.
Impact and Deliverables
By systematically involving leading innovators and entrepreneurs along with
leading academics in exploring and envisioning the future of a digital urban
community, we intend to serve as a catalyst for the creation of ubiquitous
information environments that serve in realizing human ideals and values. This
will in turn stimulate companies and organizations to design new products, new
services and new organizational forms. By creating a space for conversations
across different disciplines, we believe that the workshop and related
activities will create a significant opportunity to stimulate new approaches to
interdisciplinary research that could have enduring consequences in enhancing
the quality of life through the design and use of emerging digital technologies.
The workshop will result in an edited book on the theme of digital community
design and ubiquitous information environments. The book will be used to drive
future research and impact into the broader community. We also expect that the
workshop will result in specific new collaborative research and development
projects.
Further Information
Please contact Professor Youngjin Yoo at
youngjin.yoo@temple.edu or
+1-215-204-3058.
Program Committee
Richard Boland, Case Western Reserve University
Fred Collopy, Case Western Reserve University
Peter Coughlan, IDEO
Dan Fesenmaier, Temple University
Munir Mandviwalla, Temple University
Youngjin Yoo (Chair), Temple University
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