Design Concept for Digital Cultural Mapping

Maximizing Public Participation

The intention behind the design concept for Participatory Cultural Mapping (PCM), was to demonstrate an innovative way that can help us visualize the invisible landscape of a place. During the conceptualizing of the design idea, my approach was guided by the question: Is there a way to mobilize community’s involvement in planning their cultural assets and how can we provide equal opportunities to all members of the public to become involved? Another guiding principle in approaching the design concept was that the data generated from the public participation through the platform should be functional for cultural planning. Therefore, the remaining question is how can cultural planners extract ongoing qualitative information from various sources to support the ongoing mapping process?

At the present time, there are thousands of Application Programming Interfaces (API) that would allow designers and cultural planners to use the rich data that are generated from the participatory cultural mapping application platform. Applications such as Twitter and Flicker offer comprehensive APIs that enable different user interfaces form the actual sites. New applications, such as Infochimps and Factual, also initiated lately and were exclusively designed to provide structured data (Nathan Yau, 2011). At the individual level, the user can update friends on Facebook, share his or her location on Foursquare, or tweet about it on Twitter.
The diagram below shows the different social media tool and digital mapping are integral parts of designing a web-based platform for community identity mapping.

Purpose of the Design Concept

Any PCM initiatives has a proactive public involvement component. Therefore, the design concept for the current project was built around increasing public participation and encouraging diverse user groups to share information on their cultural assets, identities, and stories about their communities by using social media tools and interactive map applications. Based on this, the purpose was to design an empowering tool that enables the public to express their opinion on what they like about a place and why and what would make it better. The purpose was also to make information broadly available, in which visitors, local residents and organizations can discover the range of resources in the community. It can also function as an effective search tool for people to finds specific information about cultural resources they know. Collectively, the generated data can provide a wealth of information to help improve decision making and communicate different options more effectively. The data can also serve an archival function where information about cultural resources is captured for future generations.

Prototype

The proposed design concept of the platform provides a dynamic web application that operates as window for local cultural knowledge of people to be diffused and shared with other by using social media tool. It can be viewed as a channel for public participation. For example the user can post his/her thought about cultural map to facebook wall or can twitte about his or her feeling and sense of place or something unique about the place. Users can also post video by using YouTube or post images on Flicker.

The concept for interactive platform should include features that help us consolidate different sources of information to create a digital cultural map of cultural resources based on quantitative analysis of cultural inventory. Furthermore, it should incorporate options for networking and exchanging cultural contents through connection with social media tools.

These snap shots of the proposed concept design illustrates maps created by users. These maps reflect their personal view of what they perceived as cultural to them.

Features & Functionality

Photos Application

• Users can upload photo of their favorite places, spots, and cultural events.
• Photo tagging, helped by face recognition technology and comments on photos, users can tag photos with a brand, product and events.

Sharing videos

• Users can share their videos by uploading video, adding video thorough mobile and using webcam recording feature.

Security and Sharing Features

• Login approvals.
• Access to community events schedule and other cultural contents that provide useful information, e.g., tourist brochures.
• Sharing community events and activities with other users.

Other Features and Interactions

• Users can chat and exchange comments.
• Users can use phone to vote for favorite cultural landscape, assets and events.
• Promotions and updates news based on user profiles.

Benefits of Design

• Identifies clusters, hubs, opportunities
• Leads to new ways of thinking and working
• Crystallizes community identity
• Makes the invisible visible
• Is a great visual tool
• Identifies connections to city planning
• Creates baseline for bench-marking
• Supports Municipal Cultural Planning

Shortcomings of Design

• Not every resident or visitor has direct access to the Internet.
• May be too complicated for novice users.
• Difficulty of convincing people to take some time to share their cultural experiences.
• Difficult to consolidate all users’ cultural maps and information in one meaningful map.

Expansion: What Else is Possible?

Other form factor possibilities:

• Opportunities to incorporate augmented reality technology.
• Opportunities to provide a live stream video channel.
• Opportunities to customize the application platform according to users’ interests and cultural tastes.

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