Engaging the Community Through Places: An User Study of People's Festival Stories (original) (raw)

Restaging a garden party: sharing social histories through the design of digital and material interactive experiences

This paper outlines the design, development and outcomes for two student group projects, from the School of Design at Otago Polytechnic. Both projects consider ways of developing social history storytelling, through the design of interactive experiences using material and digital forms. Working with the content and histories of Olveston, a heritage home, gifted to the southern city of Dunedin, New Zealand, the projects engage historic values in innovative ways. The first project restages elements of a garden party, first presented in 1907, to celebrate Dorothy Theomin’s “coming out”. This event, documented in the local newspaper, is recreated and discoverable, through a geo-located Augmented Reality app. Scenes are restaged drawing on a combination of old photographs and new footage and recordings. The second project considers ways of developing the existing resources and narratives currently employed in the Olveston house tours to extend the visitor experience. A wide range of medi...

Engaging community members with digitally curated social media content at an arts festival: A case study about leveraging crowd-sourcing for community heritage curation

Proceedings of the Digital Heritage International Congress held jointly with the International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia, 2015

Capturing, uploading, and presenting social media content online have become the standard way for people to share their experiences with friends, family members, and others. In this paper, we describe our effort to extract, aggregate, and visualize, in a smartphone app, real-time and historical hyperlocal social media discussions and photos created at a regional arts festival that attracted over 100,000 visitors over a period of 5 days. Participants reported that the resulting content enriched their festival experience, and that it helped to create a social scaffold encouraging them to further engage and interact with others both physically and virtually through sharing even more user-contributed content.

Enhancing community awareness of and participation in local heritage with a mobile application

Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, 2014

One goal of local communities is to create and reinforce community identity by connecting residents to their local heritage. Technologies have enabled and facilitated the creation and consumption of digitized history content provided by official history institutions as well as individuals. Although much research has been conducted to understand technical and social aspects of digital cultural heritage, little empirical research has investigated how people perceive, experience, and interact with community content that is socially generated and tied to locations, particularly with respect to building community heritage. To address this, we developed a mobile application called Lost State College (LSC) and conducted a user study with 34 local residents. The study results indicate that meaningful historic places evoked special attention from the participants, and that those who have lived in the community longer tended to contribute more to the community heritage effort. Participants utilized social features as a way of learning local history, reflecting personal experiences and stories, and co-creating rich layers of local history information from their perspectives.

Curating urban memories in connecting communities

Street Art and Urban Creativity Scientific Journal, 2017

There is a worldwide growing attention on user participation in shaping urban environments in recent years. With the involvement of urban spaces in Turkey. Driven from this approach, this study examines the bottom-up transformation of a cultural space process and curate the process in order to make things visible. The process examines an urban installation to reveal narratives behind collective action through reading collective memory. The scope is to re-read the past in the present in order to generate new processes of civic engagement, and thus actions, in urban spaces.

MAKING SENSE OF HOW FESTIVALS DEMONSTRATE A COMMUNITY'S SENSE OF PLACE

The cultural aspects of a " way of life of a place " and a " sense of community " help us to better understand the processes of change being experienced in regional Australia. This article explores how community-based festivals grow over time to reflect the values, interests, and aspirations of residents. It presents observations of the nature of four community cultural festivals in destinations in the northern rivers region of NSW. The investigation explores how a sense of community and place are linked to such events. It seeks to establish how festivals develop and manage the tensions generated by different community voices. How community festivals reflect the community's sense of itself and its place validates the substantial shared interest by residents and visitors in such events.

People-Place Interactions: From Pictures and Stories to Places and Sense of Place

[ ] With Design: Reinventing Design Modes, 2022

The emergence of a networked society generates transformations in the dynamic interactions of people impacting cultural and service systems. A location can provide different individual and collective meanings, perceptions, and experiences to different people. However, it is unclear how urban actors can collect, measure, and operationalise such place-based knowledge. Thus, this work addresses the Social-Design Modes theme from the IASDR community, rethinking how urban actors can interpret place-based knowledge from a given community. This research evaluates the potential of an exploratory method involving photo-based storytelling to unpack key factors associated with a place. Geographic Information Systems support the approach in order to transfer complex subjective experiences into simple and unique geographical representations. We provide empirical evidence of how this method operationalises individual and collective place-based knowledge through two study cases. This method merges design with the 'social' to respond to pressing social questions by urban actors. The methodological implications encountered through this process may act as guidelines to inform practitioners in related fields and other areas of knowledge.

Listening to the City: Oral History and Place in the Digital Era

This essay explores the development of a mobile interpretive project, Cleveland Historical, that draws on oral history theory and practice to emphasize aurality as a key element in digital (and especially mobile) interpretive projects. Developed at the intersection of oral history and digital humanities theory and practice, Cleveland Historical suggests a model of curation that emphasizes a dynamic, layered, and contextual storytelling endeavor. The resulting curato-rial process transforms the landscape into a living museum, one in which the community actively participates in remaking understandings of place and community identity. Of particular note, this collaborative oral history project provides a transformative way of understanding " place " and of moving beyond an emphasis on visual interpretive practice, in order to provide a deeper way of building interpretive stories for public humanities exhibitions on mobile computing devices.

Suburban nostalgia: the community building potential of urban screens

2008

Urbanely nomadic residents are increasingly forgoing the potential of locale based serendipitous encounters in favour of digitally mediated interactions within their walled garden of existing social networks. This limits a sense of community in urban neighbourhoods to members of one's social network, but what of interactions with those outside of these networks, such as inhabitants of residential spaces? We report on our pilot study of open ended interviews which investigates the different user archetypes whose needs we consider when designing social technology for urban spaces. We propose a design to extend the sense of community in urban neighbourhoods beyond pure network sociality. Through a lens of 'suburban nostalgia' we envision how neighbourhood interactions might be retrofitted in new ways through civic engagement in the enhancement of environments.