The Civic Potential of Urban Storytelling through Interactive Public Displays.

The next stage in smart city development is to merge quantitative sensor data with real human perspectives in order to increase our understanding of citizen-centered challenges. One promising avenue in this realm is to empower citizens to create and disperse stories based around the human observation and perception of civÍc information and sensor data.

We thus propose the concept of contextual digital urban storytelling, i.e. the presentation of citizen-generated content through a network of public displays, augmented reality experiences, and audio and smart lighting infrastructures distributed in the urban environment.

Accordingly, this research will investigate how the spatio-temporal orchestration of stories in public space can be authored, deployed and influenced in compelling yet meaningful ways. We will systematically explore the potential orchestration design space to identify the core challenges when distributing story content through time and space. We will develop and deploy different orchestration strategies and evaluate their actual impact in order to provide some predictive power to future orchestration designs. Finally, we will critically benchmark the usefulness of these strategies towards reaching civic and urban engagement goals.