Crowd-powered mechanisms for viewing and imagining public spaces

Abstract

Crowdsourcing allows one to collect information from a large number of citizens relatively easily, thereby creating an opportunity to provide a novel technological means to view and imagine the city, complementing conventional geovisualization and urban simulation games. We postulate that the inflexibility of existing crowdsourcing frameworks can impose inherent limitations in terms of the imaginability of the city, and propose citizensourcing, which augments crowdsourcing with the mechanisms for supporting exploration and active participation in order to address the limitations. We then describe our experiences with the smartphone-based prototypes of the mechanisms, and discuss their implications for the design of citizensourcing environments.