Teaching and drawing Urban Sensing

A lightweight teaching technique for perceiving, articulating and projecting urban data

Ed. This piece was originally published at cityofsound.com on 2 September 2009.

Last year (2008) I helped teach a course around ‘The Street As Platform’ idea on the University of Technology Sydney ‘Master of Digital Architecture’ course, working with Anthony Burke, Mitchell Whitelaw and Jason McDermott.

This year (2009), I’m helping teach a course called ‘Urban Sensing’ at the University of Sydney, as part of the graduate program in Interaction Design and Electronics Arts, working with Andrew Vande Moere (of Information Aesthetics fame), Elmar Trefz and Gabriel Ulacco. It’s in broadly similar areas to ‘Street As…’, concerning urban informatics, sensors, visualisation and architectural interventions driven by such things. It’s longer in duration though, and this one includes fabrication of what Andrew’s currently calling ‘contraptions’, via CNC machining etc.

We’re doing various things, but last week I tried a technique with them that I’ve often used myself. Working with photographs of an average street scene, we asked students to imagine all the data that could be derived from the scene via sensors, in the broadest sense of the word, and then go on to sketch…