There is extensive literature documenting the benefits of games for learning.  Educators are beginning to embrace the use of games for teaching history, science, or math it is becoming clear that they provide a mechanism through which content can be made fun and relevant to learners.   There is also […]

Categories: placeofmedia

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

So there is a lot of buzz about Twitter’s new location API released today.  Not quite yet a feature of Twitter.com, the now available API will allow developers to collect location metadata from each tweet, expanding the utility of individual tweets beyond the list of one’s followers.  Who’s tweeting nearby can actually be an interesting […]

Categories: placeofmedia

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

I just returned from a very interesting conference called Communicative Cities: Integrating Technology and Place in Columbus, OH.  The main goal of the conference was to explore the concept of the “communicative city” and question exactly how cities communicate (as singular entities or as facilitating containers of social activity).  The presentations ran the gamut from […]

Categories: placeofmedia

We just finished our mock-up of the Neighborhood of Tomorrow game.   The game tries to do something a little different than most location-based games.  Instead of encouraging urban mobility and networking, this game is about location and social cohesiveness.   It asks players to focus their attention on their geographical neighborhood.  This is a tall […]

Categories: placeofmedia

Here’s the cover of my book.  It’s finally going to come out, even though it’s still months away.  The book looks at something I call possessive spectatorship in the American city, a way of looking that doubles as a kind of collecting.  I trace this idea from the late 19th century to the early 21st […]

Categories: placeofmedia · mediated urbanism · cities · place · geography

While new mobile technologies are often characterized as distractions from the world around us - just consider the outcry over train operators texting while driving - they are, in fact, technologies of attention.  They get us to pay attention to them.  Actually, that’s not true.  We don’t pay attention to our devices, we pay attention […]

Categories: placeofmedia · net-locality · mediated urbanism · mobility · cities · geography