HANK03071U MACA Specialization - Urban Media and Interfaces

Volume 2013/2014
Content

People’s use of various media and technology while dwelling in and moving about the city is the topic of this course. Use of portable media devices has rendered the contemporary urban setting increasingly multi-layered, as people interact with physically absent persons and visit online places while being on the move in the city. Through their networked electronic services, people are integrated with the software-supported urban infrastructure, which grows out from an equally invisible but nevertheless material global techno-rhizome. Public space, public encounters, dialogues and performances take on new aspects and potentialities. We question together how technologically mediated places in the city are created through the uses of portable devices and everyday practices of web-based social media: How do we research new uses of media in people’s everyday life, and the impact on understandings and appropriations of the city, where physical places and virtual space become profoundly entangled? How do we analyze and theorize our findings? And how do we design for people in this setting?

External partners

We will work with partners with particular stakes in the topic (eg. citizens, clients, politicians, consultants, companies or non-government organizations etc), and develop relevant responses to the particular challenges and opportunities of this new urban media landscape for the partners. The goal is not to solve a narrowly defined problem, but to challenge assumptions, redefine the problem, and imagine new directions for the problem field. Within the frame of the partner collaborations, students will actively formulate success criteria for the outcomes. The exact partner organizations have yet to be confirmed.

Learning Outcome

Outcomes

The outcome of the team projects should communicate to the partners and related stakeholders new concepts and the value (in the broadest sense) they propose including the process and the insights that led to these particular concepts. During research we will use video to document findings, and the outcome of the team projects will likely be communicated through the medium of video for online platforms. 

BA i Europæisk Etnologi
Transdisciplinary collaboration

The students will work in teams across disciplines: Social science students will share and develop their skills in interview, observation, and cultural analysis; while design students will share and develop their skills in articulating new opportunities through objects, spaces and visualizations. Through an iterative process the exploration of urban media and interfaces will take the form of back and forth movements between the field and the studio, as an ongoing dialogue where problems and solutions emerge in parallel. We will develop and deploy methods such as cultural probes, research prompts, design games, experience prototypes, and speculative scenarios. These methods intentionally cross over conventional borders between ‘the real’ and ‘the fictitious’, and they lie somewhere between the conventional methods of ethnographic fieldwork and design prototypes. Questioning ‘what could be’ is, in this course, inseparably connected to understanding ‘what is already there’. Staging and experiencing field situations, carrying out live experiments and creating tentative solutions are thus considered occasions for producing new knowledge as much as they are occasions for trying out new solutions.
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  • Class Instruction
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Credit
15 ECTS
Type of assessment
Written assignment
Marking scale
7-point grading scale
Censorship form
External censorship
Criteria for exam assesment