Participatory Chinatown launched on May 3 in Boston’s Chinatown.  It’s a 3-D interactive game designed to augment the traditional community meeting.  Instead of the traditional model of people responding to a powerpoint presentation about the neighborhood, participants in this meeting played a multiplayer game about the neighborhood just as they sat next to each other […]

Categories: placeofmedia · boston · hub2 · civic_engagement

Local civic engagement is an outcome of local attention.  When people engage in their neighborhoods they are paying attention to their neighborhoods amidst the myriad other things to which they could be paying attention.  They are stopping to engage in a local group, a process, or a meeting, and for that brief period of time, […]

Categories: placeofmedia · boston · hub2 · net-locality · augmented_place · mediated urbanism

The central premise of the Participatory Chinatown project is the staging of what we call “augmented deliberation.”  We introduce augmented deliberation as a possible design solution that addresses uniquely difficult contexts where deliberation is complicated by one or many external factors, including language barriers, power differentials, visualization and challenges with communicating professional […]

Categories: boston · hub2 · civic_engagement · net-locality · cities

Holly St. Clair writes about the Participatory Chinatown project in an article for the American Planning Association newsletter.  In explaining what PC will do for the planning process, she says:
The emphasis is not just on the computer simulation, but rather on the conversations and learning or rather deliberation that happens in between gaming sessions. Participants […]

Categories: placeofmedia · boston · hub2 · civic_engagement · mediated urbanism · cities

Methods of engaging communities in urban planning decisions have remained relatively stagnant. Groups of people are assembled into community centers, school cafeterias, and libraries and are asked to provide input on the professional discourse of architects and planners. They are shown drawings, computer generated renderings, even 3D models and are then “listened to” as a […]

Categories: placeofmedia · games · hub2 · civic_engagement · mediated urbanism · cities · geography

We’ve made some good progress on the Participatory Chinatown (PC) project.   Building off of the first iteration of Hub2, PC will continue with the focus on creating platforms for “augmented deliberation,” but it will do so by more thoroughly exploring the power of role play in people’s ability to understand urban issues.  In the past […]

Categories: boston · games · hub2 · civic_engagement · net-locality · mediated urbanism · cities

This should be an interesting discussion about out-of-the-ordinary applications of virtual world technologies.  I will have the opportunity to speak about Hub2 along with John Lester from Linden Lab and Drew Harry from MIT’s Media Lab.  It’s happening May 1 from 6-7:30 at the MIT Museum.

Categories: placeofmedia · boston · hub2 · net-locality · mediated urbanism

I’ve been thinking about how we might begin to think about relationship model versus transaction model when it comes to digitally augmented government.  In most configuations of e-government there is a choice between open dialog and collective decision making.  This leaves two options: unstructured talk and structured input.  It would seem that there is something […]

Categories: placeofmedia · citygovernment · hub2 · civic_engagement · augmented_place

The goal of Hub2 is to introduce a deliberative process into community meetings that currently does not exist. Who do this by integrating Second Life into the existing community process. We believe that the affordances of the tool and the specifics of the practice we built around it, we are adding the following:

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Categories: placeofmedia · boston · citygovernment · SecondLife · hub2 · gene_koo · civic_engagement · net-locality · mixed_reality · mediated urbanism · cities

For the last several weeks, Hub2 has been working on a project in the Allston neighborhood of Boston. With full support from the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) and funding from Harvard’s Allston Development Group, we have begun work on the community input process around Library Park. Our mission is to augment the […]

Categories: placeofmedia · boston · citygovernment · SecondLife · hub2 · gene_koo · civic_engagement · mixed_reality