The Civic Communication group explores how new technological infrastructures change and challenge communication in an urban setting. Our aim is – through experiments and analyses – to identify potential genres and formats of new platforms for civic communication in urban spaces and to explore their potentials. 

Civic communication is a broad category covering both organizations and businesses addressing citizens, as well as citizen-to-citizen communication. The primary domains of interest within an urban setting include

The specific technologies range from urban screens and media facades over mobile phones and pervasive computing to websites with geo-tagged information. We focus strongly on the interactive and participatory uses of technology.

Our approach is cross-disciplinary and involves a series of empirical studies based on design experiments. We see no sharp distinction between “media” and “technology”: As new technologies offer new means of communication, they are turned into media, i.e. they become platforms with established genres, formats, and modes of production.

The interesting characteristics of new platforms lie in the relation between the technology and the contexts within which these “means of mediation” are situated. In our work, we therefore look at both the properties of a given technology itself, the immediate social life around it and the general dynamics within businesses, organizations and society it connects to.

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Tags: civic communication