11th EAEA Envisioning Architecture: Design, Evaluation, Communication Conference in 2013

Track 3 | Conceptual Representation | Exploring the layout of the built environment

Telltale: visualizing the use and perception of cities through digital traces

ABSTRACT

Novel means for understanding our lives, organizations and societies are coming from the digital world and the Internet: a massive amount of information is emerging from the digitization of contemporary cities, through technologies embedded into streets and buildings or carried by people and vehicles. This stratification of experiences demands new modes of inquiry and synthesis: a new generation of city maps capable to define and visualize both physical and social environments, as well as individual and collective narratives.
Telltale is a research project conducted among three different departments of Politecnico di Milano (Design department, DAStU department of Architecture and Urban Studies, DEIB department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering) aiming at disclosing and exposing emerging issues, discourses, and uses of the cities of Milan and New York. This is done by observing and visualizing the digital traces coming from the direct experience of people who live in, visit or just pass through the city, and the news that narrate its stories and rumors, expecting to support and improve policy-making practices and to provide all the stakeholders with new insights about their cities While traditional methods used for acquiring and processing information about the cities and its fruition seem to be inadequate to meet this need, the necessary challenge for urban studies lies in the integration of available digital knowledge bases together with innovative uses of traditional data, aimed at capturing the variety of changes in urban practices.
To us, sustainability can be interpreted also as the possibility to listen to people's attitudes and perceptions about their surroundings trying to return multiple and overlapping dynamic images of the city as it is used by its citizens (residents and temporary users). This, to help stakeholders and decision makers at the urban scale to achieve more responsible decisions both at the micro (local) and macro (city) scale. The paper presents the on-going research project aims and intermediate results enlightening:
- a general framework we built to organize the actual knowledge we can extract from user generated content,
- the most meaningful urban questions possibly to be answered through those data,
- the description of the platform we are building to extract urban knowledge,
- actual applications of Telltale methods and platform for supporting decision making processes at urban scale.

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AUTHORS

Paolo Ciuccarelli

Politecnico di Milano, Design Department, Milan, Italy

Paolo Ciuccarelli is Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano and Chair of the BSc and MSc in Communication Design. Member of the board at the Design PhD, he participated to several research projects, funded by EU, the national Ministry for Research and Education and other private and public organizations. Founder of DensityDesign Research Lab, where he holds the position of scientific director; he is Project Affiliate in the 'Mapping the Republic of Letters' initiative, started by Stanford Humanities Centre. The activity of the Lab focuses on the visual representation of complex social phenomena, and includes the development of large frameworks for data and information visualization.

Giorgia Lupi

Politecnico di Milano, Design Department, Milan, Italy

Giorgia Lupi is an architect, and designer. After graduating in Architecture at Ferrara University in 2006 she as been involved in multidisciplinary projects exploring social and urban phenomena, information and technology, using design and data visualization to convey complex systems of information. She's currently researching as a PhD candidate at Politecnico di Milano, at the Design Faculty, within Density Design Lab that focuses on the visual representation of complex social, organizational and urban phenomena. Her research aims at designing new methodology for interpreting and representing urban phenomena through digital traces. In may 2011 she founded an information design company called ACCURAT based in Milan and New York. Her work and research have been presented and featured in a variety of conferences and magazines, Human City Simposium, Cumuls Conference, EyeoFestival FastCompanyMagazine, Slate Magazine, Forbes, Brainpickings among all; and won several awards such as Malofiej2013, Core77design awards, and a bronze lion at Cannes Festival 2013.

Davide Eynard

Università della Svizzera Italiana, Institute of Computational Science, Faculty of Informatics

Davide Eynard is a researcher at the Faculty of Informatics of Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI), Lugano. He obtained a Phd in Computer Science in 2009 at Politecnico di Milano. His current research mainly deals with the concept of similarity and its extension to different modalities (or views), with applications in the fields of Information Retrieval, Computer Vision, Social Network Analysis, and Semantic Web.

Fabio Manfredini

Politecnico di Milano, Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Milan, Italy

Fabio Manfredini, graduated in Environmental Sciences at the State University of Milan in 1999, is the responsible of the Data Analysis and Mapping Laboratory, Department of Architecture and Planning, Politecnico di Milano. His main areas of expertise are methods and techniques of urban and environmental analysis, design and management of geographical information systems, statistical and spatial analysis. In recent years he has been involved in several researches on the use of innovative data sources for urban analysis and planning.

Matteo Matteucci

Università della Svizzera Italiana, Institute of Computational Science, Faculty of Informatics

Matteo Matteucci is Assistant Professor at the Politecnico di Milano. In 2002 he got a Master of Science in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA), and in 2003 a PhD in Computer Engineering and Automation at the Politecnico di Milano (Milan, IT). He is actually working in both Robotics and Machine Learning, mainly applying, in a practical way, techniques for adaptation and learning to autonomous systems. His research is on autonomous robots, machine learning, and all sorts of learning machines (i.e., neural network, decision trees, mixture models, etc.) applied to real world problems.

Giorgio Caviglia

Politecnico di Milano, Design Department, Milan, Italy

After receiving his PhD in Design from the Politecnico di Milano in 2013, Giorgio is currently a post-doc researcher at the DensityDesign Lab (Politecnico di Milano) and part of the Humanities+Design Lab (Stanford University). His research stems from the intersection of Communication Design and Digital Humanities and, in particular, in the use of data visualizations and interfaces within Humanities research. His work has been presented and published internationally in a variety of conferences, journals and edited volumes, such as the MediaLAB Prado, SIGGRAPH, MIT, Stanford University, Data Flow, Malofiej, Visual Complexity.

Paolo Dilda

Politecnico di Milano, Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Milan, Italy

An Architect by education (Politecnico di Milano, 1999), Paolo Dilda works at the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies in the Data analysis and Mapping Laboratory. His research interests and competences include urban planning, geo-spatial analysis of data and thematic mapping.

Fabio Marfia

Università della Svizzera Italiana, Institute of Computational Science, Faculty of Informatics

Fabio Marfia (date of birth: 1984-03-22) is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Engineering, at Dipartimento di elettronica, informazione e bioingegneria in Politecnico di Milano. He graduated in Computer Science at Politecnico di Milano in 2010. His researches deal with data mining, Natural Language Processing, Web semantics, normative systems. His Ph.D. thesis aims at defining ways to explicitly provide users with the causes of an access permission or denial to specific resources in a complex, distributed and controlled system. He defined and developed the data mining architecture for the Telltale project, and he is actually contributing to the development of the NLP tool for the Italian grammatical and sentiment analysis to be used in the project.

Matteo Azzi

Politecnico di Milano, Design Department, Milan, Italy

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