If you will be at the Emerging Technologies Conference, please come!
Designing for Urban Green Space
This talk maps out various directions in technologies for promoting the creation and maintenance for urban green space, including (but not limited to!) sensing, automatic irrigation, social networks, online maps, mobile phones. It discusses the various constraints people who want to work within green spaces have to deal with--inclement weather, lack of power, flaky upkeep, and vulnerability to theft. It also discusses how assumptions about environmentalism, technology, nature, our relationship with living things shape the kinds of technologies people can and do make. In particular, it takes a close look at urban agriculture as a promising site for technology design through a discussion of an empirical study of urban green space volunteership. It concludes by using community gardeners to motivate some new technological directions for urban green space that put the emphasis less on automatic watering and more on deliberate living.
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