Next month I’m excited to be in Atlanta on November 14th to present at Georgia Tech’s Experimental Game Lab (6pm ET in the EGL/TSRB room 113a). A description of the talk is below.
ParTour: Mobile Storytelling and Bicycles in South L.A.
Can basic cell phones and bicycles help re-imagine the city? This talk analyzes a participatory mapping platform called ParTour. Over the past year, residents have used ParTour to transform their everyday phones into multimedia tools for neighborhood storytelling. Inspired by theories of real-world games, participants map and describe their pictures in real-time (using basic phones, not smartphones). Later, the pictures are used for city planning and turned into paper maps for advocacy. Unlike many mobile projects, the goal is not to generate data, or points-on-a-map. Instead, ParTour seeks to structure civic participation, and invigorate the neighborhood imagination — a kind of urban acupuncture. Mobile media introduces new possibilities to situate storytelling in physical spaces, with implications for place-making and civic engagement.