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Building pervasive systems requires a new way of thinking about the design and use of ICT systems and how they interweave with the built environment. In urban areas we have the greatest opportunities and the strongest demands to design and build pervasive systems, yet urban design has not featured strongly in pervasive systems research. We have no fundamental theory, knowledge base, principled methods or tools for designing and building pervasive systems as integral elements of the urban landscape. We are interested in designing not just the architectural space in which people move and behave and interact but also the interaction spaces for information and services which they discover and use and which support their movements, behaviours and interactions within architectural space. To design these new integrated systems, we need to extend and adapt our understanding and practice of urban design.
Recent research has addressed some aspects of pervasive systems in urban contexts but has rarely considered the design of pervasive systems as an integrated facet of urban design. When architecture has been considered in relation to pervasive technologies, it has typically been focused on the relatively small-scale architecture of individual buildings or even rooms and has at times been used vaguely as a term simply reflecting the notion of built physical space. Our work includes architecture at the scale of individual buildings and rooms but focuses strongly on urban design at the scale of cities. Our previous research has revealed how, through its structuring of space, urban design plays a critical role in the construction of society and social behaviours. Our space syntax research analyses cities as systems of space created by the physical artefacts of architecture and urban design in order to understand how the spatial structure of the city is related to its function. Pedestrian and vehicular movement, land use, social and economic performance, crime and many other aspects of function have been investigated using space syntax. Space syntax has also been used extensively as a design tool, for example in the Broadgate development around Londons Liverpool Street station.
From the human factors perspective, developing successful city-scale systems requires significant advances in areas such as interface design, context awareness and service discovery, to help people manage the demands on their attention and make the best use of their limited ability to descry what they want or need from this new combination of physical cityscape and digital services. From a distributed systems perspective, city-scale pervasive systems will require a fresh approach to many of the classical distributed systems issues such as communication, fault-tolerance and security. Classical solutions such as caching, multicasting and peer-to-peer sharing will require adaptation to take into account pervasive technologies (e.g. sensors, ad hoc mobile networks, limited processing and storage devices) while newer approaches, such as those in autonomic computing, may offer some solutions.
A systematic approach to designing the urban environment as an integrated system of physical architecture and pervasive technologies demands a coming together of the disciplines of Architecture and Computer Science. Key to this interdisciplinary integration is the concept of space, by which we mean not only physical location or volume but also the social protocols, conventions and values attached to a particular physical spaces. In previous work, we have contrasted architectural spaces and the interaction spaces created by artefacts such as computing and communications devices. We have proposed a categorisation of spaces, architectural and interaction, into three main groups: public, social and private. The integration of architectural and interaction spaces raises crucial issues of security and privacy. For example, instances of theft may be the result of ATMs situated in public spaces failing to create a private interaction space for an interaction involving crucial private information such as the users PIN. Previous research has focused largely on technical solutions for enforcing the privacy of data held within the system and securing interactions between devices. But this does not adequately address issues of trust in the security and privacy of interactions between people and the information and services. In considering the design of space as the integrated design of architectural space and interaction space, we need to bring together the research and practice of urban design and Human-Computer Interaction, while another Computer Science discipline, Distributed Systems, is essential to this integration. HCI and DS have tended to be separate research communities but successful Cityware cannot be designed with this division. In a system of heterogeneous devices, diverse users and varying network provision, the design and implementation of Cityware require significant advances in research and practice across a range of themes that have both HCI and DS aspects. These include context awareness; service discovery; trust, security and privacy; and the physical, psychological and social impacts of pervasive systems. Solving these problems is made even more complex, both from an HCI and a DS perspective, by the challenges of scaling up from lab based examples to a city-scale operational system.
The Cityware project integrates the disciplines of Architecture, Human-Computer Interaction and Distributed Systems, building on our previous work to develop principles, tools and techniques for designing, implementing and evaluating city-scale pervasive systems as integral facets of urban design. Cityware addresses the challenges of scaling up the design and implementation of pervasive systems to long-term, city-scale systems and evaluating these systems and their relationships with urban space and society through both targeted and longitudinal studies.
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| Dawn Woodgate joined the project on 1 December 2008. |
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| In January 2008 James Mitchell joined Cityware, working with WP2 (Bath CS and HP Labs). |
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| In January 2008 Jim Grimmett joined Cityware, working with WP2 (Bath CS and HP Labs). |
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