Clara Crivellaro, Alex Taylor, Vasilis Vlachokyriakos, Rob Comber, Bettina Nissen, Peter Wright

Abstract
We present insights from an extended engagement and design intervention at an urban regeneration site in SE London. We describe the process of designing a walking trail and system for recording and playing back place-specific stories for those living and working on the housing estate, and show how this is set within a wider context of urban renewal, social/affordable housing and “community building”. Like prior work, the research reveals the frictions that arise in participatory engagements with heterogeneous actors. Here we illustrate how material interventions can rearrange existing spatial configurations, making productive the plurality of accounts intrinsic in community life. Through this, we provide an orientation to HCI and design interventions that are concerned with civic engagement and participation in processes of making places.

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Abstract
This chapter tells a story of promise, one about London’s bike rental data and how it might be used to re-imagine new figurings of human-machine relations. Experimenting with the relational capacities of (bio)sensing and the proliferation of data-everywhere, the possibilities of other worlds are imagined. Mixtures of data at all scales are thrown together, playing with and testing out a thickening and enlivening of relations, new edges, and making room for difference—for different assemblies of bodies, space and time. Relations are brought into being that might just resist the “agencies of homogenization” () and that mess about in the unevenness and plurality that makes London vibrant.

I’ve uploaded a pre-published draft here.

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