Discussion paper

December 2006
Tash Lee, Futurelab

The full version of this paper is available to download in pdf format - see box below. On this page you'll find the paper's introduction.

Introduction

The Pleasurable Cities project was an exploratory study into how personally owned technology might be used to provide young people with a voice within their local communities, have a say in changes to their local environments, display ownership and use of social spaces and become more ‘active citizens’ within their localities.

At the core of the Pleasurable Cities project was the link between visual signs (represented by real-world place markers) and virtual conversations (both in location - via text messages, and remotely - via web-based message boards), to provide new channels for young people to express their use of space, and to discuss and comment on their expectations and desires for any development or change of those places.

The project explored the pros and cons of a proposed (and existing) range of technology-enhanced systems that utilise located media and mobile phone technologies. The aim was to create a prototype system that would:

• enable young people to have their say in location and ‘in the moment’
• facilitate discussion and debate and the sharing of ideas between peers
• result in a coherent bank of feedback/suggestions for local decision makers to review, comment and act upon.

This document provides a description of Futurelab’s background research; the thinking and concept development behind such a system and a brief review of the pertinent literature. It also provides information on a series of co-design/user-informed design workshops and focus groups we ran with young people. This early work highlighted a series of insurmountable issues to the development, integration and wide use of such a system, at least within the framework of a prototype project. As such, we postponed any technical development to take stock of and reflect on our findings to date, and to share our learning and suggestions for a way forward. The project came to Futurelab through our Call for Ideas programme.

The research and development work on which this paper is based is small-scale and the account is an exploratory one. From the limited evidence available to us, broad empirically-informed conclusions cannot (and should not) be drawn. However, our investigations to date do provide a good starting point for understanding the challenges and issues that must be overcome in order to fully integrate the use of personally owned technologies in such an active citizenship scenario.

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