The long-term goal of this project team is to advance understanding of how technology can be used to leverage the potential of public spaces to promote civic engagement, public interaction, and ultimately, life-long learning. In this EAGER project, they are carrying out a set of first steps in coming to understand how public spaces might be augmented with technology to promote and develop community interest and practice in civic engagement. The venue for the work is the Los Angeles State Historic Park, a 32-acre site in downtown LA that attracts families from several nearby ethnically-diverse neighborhoods. They are creating a prototype interpretive module for the park, an interactive mural that will act as an invitation to civic engagement and evolving social memory for the park and its surrounding communities. Evaluation centers on measuring and characterizing the engagement of park visitors, their participation with the media, and the interactions between media authorship, organizational structure, and youth civic engagement. Research is around issues in designing installations in ways that increase civic engagement, learning how and under what circumstances new types of embodied interaction technologies increase civic engagement, especially by neighborhood youth. Foundations for the design of the installation and experiences around it come from three theoretical perspectives: communities of practice, play and performativity, and the idea of an evolving social memory and the knowledge-building discourse that promotes such evolving memory. The challenge is to achieve the civic engagement and learning goals in the context of a space people visit primarily for recreation and play.
The potential broader impacts of this work lie in the possibilities of learning better how to use neighborhood and other public spaces to promote civic engagement and learning, especially among youth who frequent those places. Participation in activities in public spaces could complement formal education and be designed to support voluntary, self-directed learning, with particular potential for promoting positive affective responses and attitudes towards subject matter and ways of doing things. As a first step, this team is designing an interactive mural that community members will engage with as authors and collaborators. The goals here, as they iteratively revise the mural so that it encourages youth engagement with others in civic issues, is to move towards developing guidelines for designing other installations that could also promote such engagement. This project represents work in its early states on an untested but potentially transformative idea and is likely to catalyze rapid and innovative advances in the use of public spaces for promoting learning and civic engagement goals.
This EAGER project explored how cyberlearning technologies can be used in public space for fostering civic engagement and learning around topics in urban planning, the environment, and nature. Through a specific pilot effort with youth in Downtown Los Angeles, the researchers aimed to pilot a general approach for lay authorship of physically interactive experiences in public space -- learning experiences that use sensors to enable viewers to navigate and interact with community-authored context using their body position, spatial relationships to others, and gestures. The UCLA project team collaborated with California State Parks, the Los Angeles non-profit CityLife, and students from Lincoln High School in Northeast Downtown Los Angeles to develop and evaluate a prototype "Cybermural" system. The "Cybermural" system was designed to enable youth and others from the public to create physically interactive murals exploring key issues facing the neighborhoods around the Park, which are undergoing a significant transformation of urban development as part of the Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan. In a participatory design process, the researchers developed and tested the original technology with the youth, while attempting to develop a general technological and interface approach that could be applied in other contexts. The Cybermural system has subsequently been used by teachers and younger children at the UCLA Lab School to create their own murals and exhibit them for their parents and each other. The Cybermural system consists of a web-based authoring system in which mural authors can 1) upload and review images that they wish to use in the environment, 2) perform simple edits to prepare them for use in a collage-style mural, 3) visual assign keywords and keyword weights to them that reflect their mental models for the relationship between the images and the issues considered in their mural -- e.g., ranking images in terms of "social connectedness" and "income", 4) create a collage-style mural with these ranked images, 5) configure physical interaction with the mural by linking their own concepts to the position and gesture of mural viewers, 6) Render and present the interactive mural, which changes state visually based on viewers' actions, typically as a large interactive projection. In this way, the concepts articulated by the mural authors are used to organize interactivity, linking the conceptual considerations of the mural to its interactivity and visual design. This system is intended to be employed within a learning context where mural authors are encouraged to actively engage with the subject of the mural through Photovoice-style documentation and dialogue with facilitators. Initial results from this project and a hands-on demonstration were shared at the 2014 International Conference on Learning Sciences in the Symposium "Learning and Becoming through Art-Making: Relationships Among Tools, Phenomena, People, and Communities in Shaping YouTh Identity Development." (Enyedy et al.) Intellectual Merit: This pilot project designed, implemented, and evaluated an approach to "folksonomy-based authoring" of interactive digital experiences intended for informal learning scenarios, which is also likely to have applications in formal learning environments. It employed a participatory design process that directly engaged high school participants in the system design process. The project was conceived, developed, tested, and used in collaboration with high school students in Northeast Downtown Los Angeles, a traditionally underserved and low-income neighborhood, in collaboration with a local non-profit community organization and California State Parks. Broader Impact: This project generated reusable knowledge in how to create accessible authoring tools for youth and public creation of physically interactive experiences as part of a process of engagement and learning. It also yielded a reusable codebase that we hope to incorporate into other projects and share with other researchers. The practical knowledge of field deployment of the interactive system yielded valuable results that will be incorporated into our ongoing collaboration with California State Parks in planning for public space interactive systems, as well as subsequent proposals. Finally, technical limitations faced with off-the-shelf technology for sensing position and gesture in public space have yielded a new public/private collaboration in an open source computer vision software called OpenPTrack, specifically intended to support sensing in this type of work. OpenPTrack has subsequently been integrated with the Cybermural software and tested at the UCLA Lab School, and is being used in a number of other projects. The reseachers' experience in this project has directly informed the creation of this new technology, which is already available for download and we expect to be ready for wide use within a year.
