Speaker

Street Smarts

Saturday, 11:15 am

 

Wendy March

Senior Researcher, Intel


Presentation Abstract
The Street Smart Spaces project is a collaboration between researchers from Intel’s People and Practices Group and Nokia Research Center’s Mobile HCI Group. The research team spent two weeks observing, photographing, interviewing and analyzing interactions in one carefully selected street in a city in each of three countries. Study participants included pedestrians, store owners, store workers, residents, transit drivers, postal workers, delivery personnel, garbage collectors, police officers, local government officials and the homeless. We explored topics such as social and anti-social technology use, the flow of the day, and the plethora of rich elements that make up today’s urban neighborhood.

We have used the selection of a street with a local, neighborhood feel as a way of finding the people we should talk to, and the lives we should be designing for in a smart street of the future. Narrowing down the data collection activities to cover a relatively limited geographical area enabled emergence of rich, local narratives, specific to each street studied. This material will has helped us identify themes present in all three cultures. It has also yielded insight to place-specific issues, themes that seem to be characteristic to one culture only. Both types of findings will be of use during the concept discovery phase scheduled for this autumn.

 

Speaker Bio
photo of Doris Wells-PapanekWendy March is a Senior Researcher within Intel Research. As an interaction designer Wendy is particularly interested in translating her ethnographic research findings into new concepts and future scenarios. Since joining Intel her work has included both design and ethnographic research in the US, Europe, South America and Asia.