Cities aren’t designed or built for parents. That’s what a tragic incident that happened in New York last week illustrated yet again, as well as sparking discussions of how best we can design and build our cities to be accessible and socially inclusive.
As the article outlines, the inaccessibility issues that are increasingly arising around the design and development of our transport and cities has occurred partly because of demographic imbalances. That is cities and buildings being designed primarily by “white men, working 9-to-5 jobs”, as outlined by Kaufmann, the transportation researcher.
This echoes findings by Australia’s largest national study into community engagement in infrastructure to date. …
The timely and coordinated sequencing of infrastructure is critical to the success of Australia remarks Infrastructure Australia in its recently released report “Planning Liveable Cities: A place-based approach to sequencing infrastructure and growth” reporting that communities are increasingly disappointed by their experience of growth.
The report identifies six common challenges facing Australia’s five largest cities as they grow, citing how Australian cities are playing “catch-up”mode regarding infrastructure development and housing.
Co-creating using virtual reality in local libraries
A section in the report focuses on how existing community engagement often aims to ‘inform’ local communities about developments that have already been planned and designed. …
Today is International #DayoftheGirl and what better way to acknowledge the day than to enable young women and girls to have an input into how their cities are experienced (and designed).
Free to Be is an online mapping tool that enables girls and young women in five cities — Sydney, Delhi, Kampala, Lima and Madrid — to ‘drop a pin’ on a location and share their stories, experiences and thoughts about the environment. What they like, what makes them feel happy or safe and equally to share experiences in their cities they do not like or did not feel safe.
But the aim of the tool is more ambitious. To capture, analyze and amplify in a more strategic and quantifiable way how girls and young women feel about their cities and to use the data to propel change. …
One of the realisations we have had over the last four years building emerging technology solutions for business, is that we could never truly enable our clients to successfully apply these solutions if we didn’t also focus attention on supporting the organisation (and the senior leadership team) on its digital transformation journey.
When we build an ‘exponential technology’ solution for a client, what we want is for them to achieve exponential not incremental growth. But this cannot be achieved if at the same time we don’t also look at fostering an “exponential mindset”(more on this topic below).
Our experience building emerging tech solutions has shown us that although all of our clients are committed and passionate about deploying emerging technology solutions to digitize their core offering and / or create new digital offerings. For many, after implementing a highly successful pilot or proof of concept, they are often left unsure of steps to take to “scale up” the solution for company wide rollout and to achieve maximum impact. The end result? Valuable time lost in achieving impact and maintaining competitive distance. …
French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, music pioneer and acoustic researcher Pierre Schaeffer is known for his accomplishments in experimental and electronic music ( “musique concrète”) and reportedly for inspiring (ironically, given the focus of this article) the theme music to the cartoon, Futurama.
But he’s also (perhaps lesser known?) for his impact in the study of acoustics which are tied up, by its very nature, with the field of human perception. Studies have shown that sound is perceived twice as loud if the sound level increases by 10 dB. A 20 dB increase in the sound level is perceived as four times as loud by the normal human ear. …
Australian local government is in the midst of a reinvention and re-imagination of its place and role in local communities. That is as articulated by the recently released Australian Smart Communities Association (ASCA)report — ‘Re-imagining the Local Government Operation Model’.
Added to that, trust in Government (not just local) is at an all time low in Australia and if last weeks Liberal party leadership spill is anything to go by, it’s not getting better anytime soon.
As ASCA states, Australia is now in the bottom third of the countries surveyed in the 2018 Elderman Trust Barrometer. In fact, looking at the infographic below shows that Australia is not performing well at all and is just one spot out of being a country with “extreme trust losses” just ahead of Columbia, India and Africa. …
Cities are growing. Rapidly. Currently cities are home to more than half of the world’s population with another 2.5 billion new residents expected to be added by 2050. It’s no surprise then that smart technologies are being looked at as a way to help meet challenges of rapidly growing cities.
This month McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) released an indepth research report — Smart cities: Digital solutions for a more livable future.
Below we share our top takeaways from the report.
- ‘Smart cities’ have arrived. It’s no longer a fad or some distant future thinking. The report outlines how current smart city technologies have “unrealized potential” with dozens of existing digital applications out there that address real city challenges and human concerns. Using digital applications according to the report means that cities could “improve some key quality-of-life indicators by 10–30 percent”. …
Ann Nolan, Co-founder & COO of Snobal has been named on the B&T’s Women In Media Power List Nominees For 2018.
Running for the sixth consecutive year and presented by the Bauer Media Group B&T‘s Women in Media Awards nominations under 21 categories recognises those “exceptional women who have achieved success in their professional arenas and celebrates their invaluable contribution through their leadership, innovation and courage to their industry.”
At Snobal we love this as it is awesome to see the world of startup storytelling receiving recognition through Ann’s nomination.
Startup Storytelling can almost be seen as a category onto its own. There are the ever ending challenges of telling your (often) constantly changing fledgling company’s story with minimal to zero budget, stretched resources, little dedicated staff and many times with only your wits and creativity to draw on. …
If you happen to be at the Dubai International Ambulance Conference this week then be sure to drop into the Real First Aid stand for a demonstration of their virtual RealMCI (Real Mass-Casualty Incident).
The software solution we have built for Real First Aid enables the trainee to assess, treat, triage and communicate back to “base” on a MCI.
MCI’s are by their very nature complex and chaotic. Using virtual reality in a high consequence training environment like this can lead to more meaningful and grounded learning experiences. …
One of the little pleasure you get working in emerging technology is occasionally coming across articles specifically addressing the potential application of emerging technology in your field. In Snobal’s case this is the use of artificial intelligence(AI) assisted virtual reality (VR)for planning, design, stakeholder engagement and maintenance in engineering, infrastructure and smart cities.
The writer(s) often outlines in detail their thoughts and ideas around how VR could be applied and how they envisage the emerging technology offering value, cost effectiveness and a more productive solution. And you find yourself nodding excitedly.
Today that article was a journal article called Investigating the Role of Virtual Reality in Planning for Sustainable Smart Cities that appeared in the journal Sustainability in November 2017. And the writers are academic researchers from our own home town — Melbourne! …
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