Source: Co-Design Group About three years ago, prior to entering UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning, I had a chance to attend a demonstration of the co-design method pioneered by architect Stanley King. This article will give a brief rundown of the major activities involved in a co-design process, This will be followed by [...]
Last Thursday, friends and local web app artisans Tylor Sherman and Todd Sieling (principals of Denim and Steel) launched This is Our Stop, a web application they have spent the last few months developing and testing. It is a refinement of my original concept of “a Facebook wall for every bus stop” I proposed back [...]
Inspired by my friend Raul Pacheco-Vega’s recent use of Twitter to encourage scholars to talk about their research, I’d like to get planning researchers and practitioners talking a little bit about what they get from using Twitter. There’s always been a lot of misperceptions — that Twitter is only for reading headlines, sharing what you [...]
#myresearch looks at how planning orgs have used & understand Twitter for public engagement on sustainability issues. Here’s a little more on what that research is looking at, why I chose Twitter, and what I hope to get out of this research.
A while back, Colleen Nystedt responded to my post about anonymity in public engagement. She’s said, several times, with reference to the challenges her platform PlaceSpeak is attempting to address, that “anonymity breeds contempt.” I had a comment in her response to her, but it was lost getting from the textbox I was typing in [...]
Last week, TransLink announced that they are running a contest/campaign on their Facebook page involving riders’ pet peeves in transit. They are encouraging people to people to vote, elimination-style, on the behaviors observed on transit that people find most irritating. The incentives to do so, aside from that wonderful feeling of having gotten your feelings [...]
Scott Berkun writes that there are two kinds of people in the world: simplifiers and complexifiers. Complexifiers are averse to reduction. Their instincts are to turn simple assignments into quagmires, and to reject simple ideas until they’re buried (or asphyxiated) in layers of abstraction. […] They take pride in consuming more bandwidth, time, and patience [...]
Source: ekosystem.org Jack Mason, an IBMer working on the IBM Smarter Cities Tumblr, wrote a couple weeks ago: As an IBMer working on Smarter Cities — and a New Yorker for much of my adult life — I’d like to observe that Adam Greenfield doesn’t know me, my motivations, or those of the thousands of [...]
Summary (aka tl;dr) World Usability Day and World Town Planning Day are two events celebrated very close together, in the first week of November. I propose having a joint project or event to lay the groundwork for conversation between urban planners and user experience practitioners, and the insights each can bring for navigating the urban [...]
danah boyd writes on the recent Internet debate around Google banning the use of psuedonyms on its new social networking service, Google+. She writes, Over and over again, people keep pointing to Facebook as an example where “real names” policies work. This makes me laugh hysterically. One of the things that became patently clear to [...]
