Laura Forlano

Bio: Laura Forlano is an academic researcher from Illinois Institute of Technology. The author has contributed to research in topics: Participatory design & Wireless network. The author has an hindex of 17, co-authored 51 publications receiving 898 citations. Previous affiliations of Laura Forlano include Columbia University & Yale University.

Decentering the Human in the Design of Collaborative Cities

Abstract: Cities are currently being redesigned with sensors and data at their core. Environmental monitoring, crime tracking and traffic mapping are just a few examples of the socio-technical syste...

From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement

Abstract: Web 2.0 tools, including blogs, wikis, and photo sharing and social networking sites, have made possible a more participatory Internet experience. Much of this technology is available for mobile phones, where it can be integrated with such device-specific features as sensors and GPS. From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen examines how this increasingly open, collaborative, and personalizable technology is shaping not just our social interactions but new kinds of civic engagement with cities, communities, and spaces. It offers analyses and studies from around the world that explore how the power of social technologies can be harnessed for social engagement in urban areas. Chapters by leading researchers in the emerging field of urban informatics outline the theoretical context of their inquiries, describing a new view of the city as a hybrid that merges digital and physical worlds; examine technology-aided engagement involving issues of food, the environment, and sustainability; explore the creative use of location-based mobile technology in cities from Melbourne, Australia, to Dhaka, Bangladesh; study technological innovations for improving civic engagement; and discuss design research approaches for understanding the development of sentient real-time cities, including interaction portals and robots.

More-than-human participation: design for sustainable smart city futures

Abstract: Out of necessity or choice, people and wildlife are increasingly living side-by-side in urban environments. As more species live together in cities, this presents significant environmental challenges associated with high density living, poor resource management, long supply chains, habitat loss and pollution. These conditions can be toxic for humans and non-humans alike. One response has been to make cities “smart” using networked sensing, cloud and mobile computing, to optimize, control and regulate urban processes. “Smart” initiatives are often presented as a social and environmental good. An accompanying agenda however has been to spur on sales of novel technology, with its attendant benefits for a small number of companies and their employees. In other words, smart cities are often positioned as solving environmental problems through technologically-driven, human-centered, and solution-optimizing approaches that promise great benefit, but include a number of faulty premises. While many governments are developing participatory approaches to sustainability challenges, the focus however, remains largely human-centered. Such approaches are often too simplistic to address the complexities of long-term environmental sustainability. They also fail to acknowledge how human and non-human lives - or the “more-than-human” - are inseparable and interdependent, and how we all participate in urban life [2]. Without care, smart city agendas may exacerbate the very problems they seek to solve. What will it take to create a real shift in mindsets of those responsible for smart city design to take a more-than-human participatory perspective? What can we, as designers and educators, do to respond to the environmental challenges our future cities face? In this article we propose an alternative smart city agenda for the interaction design community in responding to a more-than-human perspective. To help us explore and imagine what this agenda could be like we illustrate our discussion with examples shared as part of an interdisciplinary workshop at the Participatory Design Conference, Hasselt Belgium in 2018 [4].

Participation is not a Design Fix for Machine Learning

Abstract: This paper critically examines existing modes of participation in design practice and machine learning. Cautioning against 'participation-washing', it suggests that the ML community must become attuned to possibly exploitative and extractive forms of community involvement and shift away from the prerogatives of context-independent scalability.

The Practice Of Everyday Life

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