The Digital Urban Living research group
Digital Urban Living is an interdisciplinary research project based at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. The project brings together interaction design and urbanism, and focuses on how digital technologies and media enable new ways of designing urban services and positively affect issues of societal participation, social sustainability, design and governance of cities and societies.
Urban environments are teeming with communication technologies, and data and media are increasingly ubiquitous, flexible and integrated across urban governance, industry and daily practices. Urban digital services combine data, infrastructures and people in ways that serve commercial and/or civic purposes in the city. Moreover, digital systems based on ‘big data’ — the collection and analysis of vast amounts of information — are increasingly used in governance, planning and public service provision as well as in policy and decision making. Thus, the design of digital services is increasingly important for how cities are planned, built and lived in.
Digital technological systems should be understood as infrastructures for everyday networked life, but also for business and city maintenance and operation, and the project seeks to identify new ways of joining together and mobilising interdisciplinary competencies and perspectives across the digital design and urbanism fields. From this position, it studies the political agencies embedded in technological systems that cities increasingly rely on, and the challenges they present, in order to point to the possibility of developing platforms for policies, practices and cultures that facilitate and encourage transparent and accountable digital infrastructures.
The Digital Urban Living (Digitalt Byliv in Norwegian) research network is lead by Einar Sneve Martinussen, and includes, among others, Kai Reaver, Jonny Aspen, Petter Hemmersam and Jørn Knutsen. The Digital Urban Living network includes partners from the civic sector, the digital sector and the field of urbanism. This Medium-publication collects various writing, cases and work-in-progress from the project. Other research publications can be found at the research-project’s website.
