OurCity - FutureEverything
VoiceYourView are proud to be working with the FutureEverything festival, artist Adam Nieman and Manchester Communication Academy on an installation for this years FutureEverything festival. VoiceYourView mobile and web apps drive the installations which projects summaries of comments onto an installed map.
For further information please see the FutureEverything pages at: http://futureeverything.org/innovation/mass-participation/
OurCity - Adam Nieman, Drew Hemment
OurCity combines physical connections with Manchester with feelings about and aspirations for the city. It is a prototype for a new way for people to have their voice heard and to act together to shape a new plan for the city, to reduce the gap between citizens and policymakers, and form new groupings based on commitment to social action.
OurCity is a response to a new technology and the opportunities it provides for connecting people and place. It is driven by VoiceYourView developed at Lancaster University, a system for collating and analysing thousands of individual comments, to reveal patterns of theme, sentiment and actionability. In OurCity comments are solicited in a number of ways, but mainly by text or via a web app optimised for smart-phones. The comments do not have to conform to a fixed format so the analysis avoids reducing individual perspectives to 'mere' statistics the way a survey might. The project combines individual perspectives with statistical insight in a way that helps viewers / participants identify themselves as active constituents of Manchester, not mere observers. In this way, OurCity is about how individuals relate to the whole and about how ideas about a city map to its geography.
This is unknown territory, we don't know what we'll find in the space between individuals and statistics. VoiceYourView opens up a space that is otherwise inaccessible to information designers and data artists – somewhere between individual perspectives on the one hand and their abstract representation in statistics or raw data on the other. OurCity is a provisional attempt to explore that space – a reconnaissance. It is a nexus for mass participation and supports imaginative engagement with the city that follows agenda set by children.
Participants' aspirations and fears for Manchester are not solicited in vacuum. The agenda has been set in a series of workshops with 11 and 12 year old children at Manchester Communication Academy. The school's values as interpreted by the children have seeded the comments on which OurCity is built. In an imaginative exercise the children explored their hopes and fears about the future and in a tour of the city centre they recorded their response to their city.
An installation in the FutureEverything art space encourages viewers to locate themselves in the city by expanding space. Engaging with the installation involves a sense of connection with the city beyond the walls of the gallery until the area you feel you are inhabiting is at least 10 km across. Engaging with the installation also involves locating your own feelings and aspirations for to the city amongst thousands of others.
OurCity aims to imagine a city on all scales at once. There are as many cities as there are inhabitants – different people and communities attach different meanings to its buildings and landmarks. Thinking about a city as a whole usually wipes out individual perspectives – like seeing the picture as a rabbit obliterates the duck. But if individuals could see the ‘big picture’ and individual perspectives at the same time this alone would transform Manchester, maybe for the better.
Manchester is a duck… no wait, it's a rabbit, no, hang-on its…
A ECAS Festival As Lab commission – Adam Nieman is leading a creative collaboration with Lancaster University, FutureEverything and Manchester Communication Academy.
