Speculative Explorations of Affective, Place-based Experiences
Join us in an exciting wokshop to share your experiences and co-design emotionally responsive urban spaces.
What
Urban spaces have the capacity to generate affective responses and entice emotions. They can be lively and cheerful, fearful, or boring, and these emotions can be triggered by design elements, or by previous experience and memory. However, urban design and the smart city agenda have often minimized the role of emotions in the built environment. In this workshop, we will actively engage in co-mapping, ideating and speculating potential affective interactions in future cities.
How can you contribute?
We curate a typology of urban spaces and emotional states, as well as a toolkit of strategies from urban design and HCI research and practice. We invite participants to contribute their own selection of places and emotional states, iterate on tools, and conceptualize speculations for the affective city. Our workshop will result in a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between people, places, technology and affect. Attendees will have the opportunity to gain a critical understanding of affective affordances of varied interventions in urban interaction design, media architecture and urban design, such as placemaking and tactical urbanism, storytelling, urban playfulness, mixed reality applications and tangible interactions.
Who can participate?
Participation is open to registered Mindtrek participants, as well as professionals and practitioners from varied backgrounds and students of Tampere University. Participation for workshop is free of charge. If you would like to attend the rest of the Mindtrek conference, please register and pay the attendance fee on the conference website.
Benefits
- Gain new insights in urban design, spatiality and affective interaction
- Develop hands-on skills on crafting speculations related to future cities
- Co-design speculations together with workshop organisers and be involved in follow-up activities, such as future publications
- Mindtrek conference will provide participants with a certificate of attendance
Registration
Please submit a short bio and your expression of interest on the registration link.
We are inviting the participants to produce the basis of case studies that will be considered in the workshop. Please think of three urban spaces from your direct experience, that are meaningful to you and incite certain emotions. These spaces could be open (such as city squares), or enclosed (such as waiting halls of bus terminals). They can incite feelings of joy, fascination or of boredom and unease, and in your opinion should be emphasized or transformed. Within the registration form, please include some details of the spaces, including photographs, location, and a brief description of the emotions that you associate with each space.
Selection process
Contributions will be selected based on specific place and emotional experiences. We aim to accept a variety of contributions as well as background profiles of participants, including students, researchers and practitioners. Prior experience or knowledge in urban interaction design is not a requirement.
Deadlines and venue
- The deadline for workshop registration is November 11th, 2022, end of day
- Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by November 13th, 2022
- The workshop will be held on the 18th of November at Tampere University City Center Campus (the exact location will be announced in due time).
Workshop schedule
The first part of the workshop will focus on mapping place-based experiences; the second on co-designing speculative artifacts. We will start with an introduction to the workshop topic and invite participants to reflect and co-map places and emotions, based on the submitted photos. In the second half, we will introduce a toolkit of interventions, including digital, hybrid and physical design strategies. Participants will be invited to choose methods and define their speculative affective technologies and interventions. We will wrap-up the workshop with a critical discussion on understanding and representing lived urban experiences, as well as challenges and opportunities in designing for the “affective city”.
Morning session
- Critical introduction to smart cities and urban technology implementation
- Co-mapping of emotions and places
- Ideation: creating an emotive map of places and setting affective goals
Afternoon session
- Co-design warm-up: introduction to toolkit
- Speculative design: defining speculations
- Discussion and wrap-up
Organisers
Irina Paraschivoiu – Center for Human-Computer Interaction, University of Salzburg
Janset Shawash – Gamification Group, Tampere University, Tampere
Marta Dziabiola – Center for Human-Computer Interaction, University of Salzburg
Narmeen Marji – Gamification Group, Tampere University, Tampere
Alexander Meschtscherjakov – Center for Human-Computer Interaction, University of Salzburg
Mattia Thibault – Gamification Group, Tampere University, Tampere
Contact
Information about the conference: MINDTREK 2022
For any questions and comments, please contact:
This workshop takes place as a part of the project 5G Exploration Space Salzburg, financially supported by Land Salzburg as a part of WISS 2025: Research, Innovation and Technological Development.