Citizen Dialogue Kit
Research[x]Design - KU Leuven, 2018
Citizen Dialogue Kit is an open source toolkit for urban visualizations. The Citizen Dialogue Kit is intended to ease the creation of impactful public displays for visualizations of urban data through a content ideation method, custom open source software and casing designs for off the shelf hardware components. Too often potentially impactful urban data ends up on online platforms and struggles to reach local actors. This project, inspired by citizen science and open data initiatives, is an attempt to bring this data back into its original context where it potentially has the most relevancy: the city streets. Polling buttons integrated into the displays draw in passers-by, encourage them to reflect on the presented data and facilitate contributing opinions to become part of the dialog.
The system uses e-ink displays, 3G-connected microcontrollers and large power banks to enable easy and flexible deployments around the city.
Our continuing research investigates how our methodology can empower people to compose engaging narratives using data and multiple contextually situated displays, and how passers-by and neighborhood inhabitants interpret and experience these narratives. Preliminary deployments in collaboration with a bottom-up citizen science project indicate the potential of the concept. Longer future deployments and collaborations are already planned, e.g. about housing.
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This project received funding from OrganiCity, a European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the grant agreement No. 645198. Link: http://organicity.eu Preliminary evaluations and deployments were carried out in collaboration with Civic Lab Leuven. Link: http//leuvenair.be