may I have your attention, please ?

snap

may i have your attention, please ?

supervisors Prof. Iris Utikal Typography and Layout Prof. Andreas Wrede Identity and design MA thesis brief - WS2015/6 Mohamed Hassan Kรถln International School of Design

what we have here.

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・abstract

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・section 1 - city perception

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・section 2 - city archiving

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・section 3 - crowdsourcing

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・section 4 - perception - archiving - crowdsourcing

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・section 5 - identifying blind spots of attention

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・section 6 - tests

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・ appendix

/ perception / sharing

・6 ・image

・frame

・city

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abstract.

・In every city we go to or live in,we take the same pictures over and

over again then share them on social media so what about what we leave then?

Why do we sometimes stop and take a picture for that building in our manmade environment from this or that specific angle?

This thesis investigates the positioning and framing of taking pictures of man made environments. It takes crowdsourcing platforms such as instagram as a tool to analyze people’s perception of this man made environment. It also relies on experimental tools such as workshops and interactive exhibitions as a means to test the hypothesis if this archive of pictures could be used to reconstruct a city’s man made environment through these pictures.Through this experimental part blind spots that fall out of the attention of people’s perception shall be identified. These blind spots are considered an area for potential intervention for design.

・blind spots of attention

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・archiving the city ・crowdsourcing ・destination image ・city’s perception ・attention design

・NRW case ・thisisegypt case ・instagram case

・Visuals create - whether on

purpose or not - what we call city’s identity (architecture, arrangement of streets and open places - Lennard S.H.C 1995). City’s perception is important to define what we grasp and we leave or what we value and we do not.

・Social media is already a

platform of visual identities and attentive residues like photographs.Pictures are medium and messages where meanings are mixed but can reveal a lot

about urban culture and visual attention.

・Collective visual library is

always a potential of creating city’s documentation or archive for what we may call heritage or city’s identity. *attention design is a new term that was concluded in my past research which investigates the relationship between design realm and attention psychology.

Attention design is a question of whether attention can be measured and quantified or not. How can design use/ be used by attention.This study is NOT to validate the term ‘attention design’ yet but it is a supplementary and on-going research to feed into the original hypothesis.

You can read more about observations here : red book and the conclusion here : white book

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background ・We are visual beings, easily distracted by the overwhelming information we see every day.

Today’s currency is not information anymore , rather our ‘attention’ to this information. (mark) Attention** is always an individual subjective reaction.

Attention is a matter of perception.(“Attention acts as a means of focusing limited mental resources on the information and cognitive processes that are most salient at a given moment” - Sternberg,1999).But now, we are overwhelmed by information, over-attention (being surrounded by a lot of filters (Broadbent 1958) and over-capacity information) flooding cities and shaping its visuals.

・city

・10 ・what we tag/see

objectives

・The objectives of this thesis

is to examine how people’s perception of their surrounding man made environment influences their decision and positioning in taking a picture.

It is also questioning whether a crowdsourcing platform - like instagram - could be relied on as a City Archive. The attempt to reconstruct a city through its hashtag linked pictures is to identity “over attention” areas of the city from blind spots of attention. Unlike the scanning methodologies of cities that

attempt to archive and preserve all the details of a city to construct an exact picture of it when needed, this experiment is based on selective attention as a tool to reconstruct a city through its people’s subjective perception.

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research questions ・Why and When do we position ourselves to take picture of man made environment? ・How much can we reconstruct of a city’s identity out of crowdsourced photos? ・How much does people’s attention documented through their photography grasp of a city? ・How does people’s perception of a city contribute to its identity? ・Can a crowdsourcing platform - like instagram - work as a City Archive? ・ What are blind spots that fall out of attention? ・Would these blind spots fall out of memory and fall out of the perceived city and later out of its identity and later its memory?

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methodology ・The methodology of this thesis will follow two sections. Section one will be an analytical part. Analyzing traditional means of archiving a city, visiting City Archives and critically evaluating those means. As well as examining the potentials of crowdsourcing platforms, with a focus on instagram for its “exhibiting” and visual based collection strategy. Unlike exhibiting and sharing pictures for individual purposes, how can it be used for a cause. How can “Big data” collected through it be used as a tool for design? It is also means to investigate the attentional and distracting media types in design where a lot of technological developments have occurred. What we are facing now is information dominated by attention design . ・Section two will be an experimental phase. Taking Koeln and other cities of the NRW as case studies different workshops, experiments, and an exhibition will be conducted to examine the potential of using “Big Data” from instagram to construct an alternative City Archive.

structure ・The structure of this paper is a journey from attention design to the blind spots of attention through the exploration of people’s perception of their man made environment based on crowdsourced material about cities. The first section will examine the term City perception, what it is, how is it constructed and how does it change through attention elements? Section two will analyze the processes of archiving with a focus on City Archives? How they work and how could crowdsourced “Big Data” contribute to a perception based City Archive. Section three is dedicated to the potentials and challenges of crowdsourced “Big Data” as a design tool. Examining different uses of it in design processes and identifying tools of using it in the experimental part of the research. Section four would link the different terms together to construct the hypothesis claiming crowdsourced “Big data” can be used to construct a perception based City Archive.

Section five is identifying shortcomings of the hypothesis and the potentials of these shortcomings. Through defining and identifying blind spots of attention, this section will

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critically rethink these blind spots as a potential for design intervention and contributors to the city’s identity that had not been examined yet rather than a blank in the current identity and later a hole in the memory.

Section six is documenting the experimental part of the research presenting results and findings of the workshops and experiments conducted reflecting these findings on the hypothesis. This will be followed by a conclusion attempting to answer the research question presented.

・city

・14 ・views / frames / photos

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City Perception.

・Perception is a highly negotiated term and is used in various

ways. There is no clear and distinct definition for what perception is.According to William James, Perception is: “ The consciousness of particular material things present to sense” (James, 2014, p.76). While Hamilton defines it as “consciousness of external objects”. As for Spencer, perception is the relation between states of consciousness partly representative and partly representative. In my thesis i will refer to perception as “ The consciousness raised by selective attention in a specific material things present to sense”

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How is it constructed? ・Yet all previously mentioned definitions clarify that perception is a very individualistic act and is subjectively constructed. James argues that we do contribute largely to what we perceive. “ Whilst part of what we perceive comes through the object before us, another part comes out of our own head” (James, 2014, p.103). This part that we contribute with to what we perceive could be identified as our selective attention.

Perception links information to meaning. When given information we usually not only sense it but shape it through in our mind by giving meaning to it. The built environment is full of information, mainly visual information. And so our perception of it is visually driven as well.

Who constructs it? ・Through our daily encounters within the city we construct those perceptions. At some times we just leave these perceptions inside our minds and use them to shape meaning towards our surrounding. At other times these perceptions are reflected in actions we decide to take towards this surrounding. The act of taking

pictures and the choice of positioning towards these objects is one of these acts.

How does it change? ・When we speak of destination image, we should revise some brand’s image definitions like: “The brand image consists of everything people associate with the brand” (Newman, 1957) “An image is not individual traits or qualities but the total impression an entity makes on the minds of others” (Dichter, 1985) Although Crompton (1979) defines the destination image as “Sum of beliefs, ideas and impressions that a person has of a destination”

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City Archiving.

ăƒťArchives are the accumulation of historical records, mainly

consisting of primary documents that were originally collected individually as a result of everyday processes.

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What are city archives? ・City archives contain historical records and archival materials and documents in reference to a specific city.

Significantly city archives behold a huge record of the cities built environment collected from old maps, pictures, documents, footages, and sometimes even personal documentation taken by individuals taken consciously or unconsciously for the the sake of archiving. Cologne city archive and the accident of its collapse in 2009 are huge evidence on the importance of city archives to the memory of a city. 90% of the archival documents were buried under the collapse and a large number of documents were damaged and needed to be restored.

Currently a new archive building is being constructed yet with some hesitation due to the financial crisis. The new archive shall include also the “Rheinlandische Buildarchive” including a collection of photographs on the history of art, architecture, culture and photography in Cologne and the Rhineland. But would have happened if the collapse of this archive would have damaged these documents and archival material forever? How would have that affected the city’s

identity and its citizens and visitors perception of the place?

The accident should have raised questions about if traditional archives are enough to preserve a city’s identity and memory.

・On the other hand, in a

city like Cairo, access to city archives is very problematic and challenging. Not only is the city growing beyond the capability of any archival technique to capture its elements and transformation, it is also highly expensive and needs a tremendous amount of resources. Other cities in Egypt have very little archival efforts to document its built environment and will most lightly be forgotten by time very soon.

why are they important? why are archives problematic? what are new archives? (past present - future) ・Digital technology is dramatically changing archives and their techniques. In earlier times the archiving process used to happen after the process had been conducted.

Now digital devices generate, publish, share and archive material all at the same time.

Photo sharing platforms like Flickr and instagram are creating

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a huge digital library and visual archive for activities, events and places not necessarily archiving only primary data but accounting each personal experience as a primary data. Especially when it comes to the built environment, pictures are documenting places and the built environment from thousands of different angles and framing them differently according to personal perceptions. This subjectivity of archival material is very rare when compared to traditional archives.

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crowdsourcing.

・There is no doubt that information is flooding and spreading

unintentionally and enormously around us. Now we can see a lot of research targeting the utilization of big data and its usage in urban/cultural approaches. According to Oxford dictionary, Big Data is defined as “Extremely large data sets that may be analysed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behaviour and interactions.” Big Data is tightly linked to the emergence of communication technologies and its high affordability that facilitated the generation of it. Nowadays,it is mainly generated by the people themselves - through the lowest point of interaction e.g. smartphones - and from another side it is realtime data.Which is not anymore a question of reliability or accuracy.

It is an open ocean of a very complex archive of knowledge which is expanding every second.

・From traffic lights to air

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quality, crowdsourcing data mining is very feasible and applicable. There have been many trials to use crowdsourced platforms - especially of photo sharing - to generate questions and results connected to urban/ heritage phenomena. Even to determine sidewalk accessibility through the analysis on Google Street View. or to analyze crowdsourced photos to know how hazy the environment is, to predict at the end the pollution level (airtick).

・It is clear that we can see

high level of self-recognition or other motivational sources that create this sharing ??? society which can be looked at from the data perspective as great source of participatory activity and with better tools and means could be enhanced more if it was intentional and geared towards the scientific research laboratory.

why instagram ? ・Instagram - as the first leading prominent photo sharing platform with its open API - has more than 80 million average photos submitted per day and more than 400 million activity per month. The true nature of instagram - along

with having geo-tagged images - as a self-representation tool gives researchers in sociology, psychology, urbanism, tourism and others the opportunity to explore fabrics on a societal level.There are more than 28% of instagram users using it more than once per day worldwide (statica) and more than 41% of 16-24 age group and 35 % of age group 25-34 years .

From the previous mentioned statistics we can conclude that instagram users cannot represent everyone. Technology has its limitations specifically in terms of its target and users group. Yet on the other hand the percentages presented indicated that instagram users are a crucial part of the society that could be the examined group in this research.

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mapping: http://instaearth.me/#/popular http://www.whatsthere.co http://www.instabam.com/#find https://instmap.com http://worldc.am/id/4aef5d85f964a520dfd721e3 http://www.mapstagram.com

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・crowd sourcing

・city archiving

・city perception

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perception - archiving - crowdsourcing.

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ăƒť31 using geo-tagged photos as medium to deliver awareness about the city in those different projects.

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tools of information based on instagram 1.https://www.instagram.com/sadtopographies/ collecting odd sad names of topographies out of google maps.

2.https://itp.nyu.edu/classes/cow-fall2015/diorama-instagram-memory-map/ digital archive map based on instagram 3. https://indatalabs.com/discover-hong-kong-through-the-lense-of-instagram/ hong kong’s top mentioned brands on instagram 4. https://www.thinglink.com/scene/599515895584260096 replacing the metro stations information with feeds of instagram’s photos

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ăƒť35 http://phototrails.net/instagram-cities/ a huge effort has been put into different trials in visualizing instagram photos of different cities according to selected criterias.

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1.https://snapmap.knightlab.com/#top tracking your instagram journey through places on a map 2.http://michellechandra.github.io/synchronicity.html tracking sunrise and sunset photos on a timeline map 3.http://wearedata.watchdogs.com live data of people in three different cities . Feeds from twitter, flickr and instagram on one map along with some real-time transportation information.

4. https://cewe-photoworld.com/instagram-food-capitals/ instagram’s food capitals based on hashtagged food photos 5.http://time.com/2015-most-popular-us-landmarks-instagram/ the most instagrammed places in america

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blind spots of attention. ・The problematic of “Big Data” is mainly that it is not theme and

purpose specific.For this reason the use of it is very difficult as it is not archived in a categorical manner.Hashtags, in the case of instagram for example, may ease this categorization but depend heavily on individualistic choices of linking a specific photo to a specific hashtag. The problematic of archival data is that its selection is elitist. Both techniques the traditional and the digital crowdsourced archive hold in their visual information blind spots created through their very own matter and methods and probably cannot be avoided.

Blind spots are areas that hold potential especially when it comes to man built environments in cities. In the act of framing to take a photo one chooses to keep something outside the frame and creates a blind spot to this specific photo. Collective photo capturing, like in the case of flickr and instagram,seem to cover each and every angle of the same place. Searching for a hashtag of specific place or monument would appear as if there is nothing more to be captured. The attempt to reconstruct a place through its collective photos would identify the remaining blind spots that fallen out of the choice of all individual frames.

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tests.

ăƒť42 These are some results of the different participants and some of the pictures they chose to take.

ăƒť43 a.take a picture of this city ăƒťA small mock of imaginary city elements was made to test the different selective attention of its perceivers. The mock city is constructed of different ordinary elements any man made environment of a city could consists of. Participants were asked to take pictures of the different frames they find interesting or captures their attention in this city. The test was made to collect the different perceptions of the different participants reflected in their positioning to take these pictures towards the city and analyze the different frames they chose.

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ăƒť45 These are some results of the different participants and some of the pictures they chose to take.

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ăƒť48 b.shopping streets perspectives ăƒťShopping streets are a very significant element of most of the modern cities today. Shopping streets are attraction point for both citizens and visitors. They create an environment and an experience for the users. It is observed that construction of these shopping streets based on pictures taken of them are almost the same in different cities. Similarities of the perception of these very special experiences of this specific man made environment dedicated for shopping can be tracked analyzing these picture

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・53 c.hidden city of efferen Efferen is the suburban area of cologne consisting of the students settlement owned and operated by the Studentenwerk. The mini- city inside this very “insignificant neighborhood” hold hidden potential only known to the people inhabiting it.Engaging with Efferen’s inhabitants proof a very special collective perception towards this mini-city reflecting more than would just appear on a first glance.

ăƒť54 main hidden feature of the students compound of efferen.

・”effereno”

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・”party” ・”ikea-efferen”

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・57 d.contructing the blind spots - Kolner Dom ・The experiment of reconstructing a man made environment through its crowdsourced pictures raises a lot of questions and challenges presented here in this research. This test- experiment was done on the cologne dom - one of the city’s most significant buildings and icons creating a major part of its identity and influencing people’s perception to this city. Reconstructing the dom through instagram pictures is an attempt to identify whether crowdsourcing platforms could be used as archives for cities. It is trying to examine what blind spots fall out of the attention of people taking pictures of the dom.

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ăƒť59 a lot of instagram photos can be found in any of the online mapping search. for the dom.

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ăƒť61 laying out most significant photos on its original positions where it was taken.

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ăƒť63 laying out most significant photos on its original positions where it was taken.

ăƒť64 collage 1 - entrance : defining the significant (attentive spots).

ăƒť65 collage 2 - hbf : defining the significant (attentive spots).

・Mahall, Mona, and Asli Serbest. How Architecture Learned To

Speculate.

Stuttgart: Institut Grundlagen moderner Architektur und Entwerfen (IGMA), 2009. Print.

・Andersen, Michael Asgaard, and Henrik Oxvig. Paradoxes Of Appearing.

Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2009. Print.

・Preziosi, Donald. The Semiotics Of The Built Environment.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979. Print.

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・Hesselgren, Sven. Man’s Perception Of Man-Made Environment.

Lund: Studentlitt., 1975. Print.

・Lynch, Kevin. The Image Of The City. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960. Print.

・Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning From Las Vegas.

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977. Print.

・Norman, Donald A. The Design Of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Print.

・Bergson, Henri, Nancy Margaret Paul, and William Scott Palmer.

Matter And Memory. London: G. Allen & Co., 1912. Print.

・Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. Print.

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appendix.

urban environment

mental act / design decision

camera

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seeing attention

fram

perceiving deliberate

+ in-deliberate / deliberate

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delibe

saving

ming

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erate

memory / data

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a medium

digital form / social media

valuing

sharing deliberate

+ in-deliberate

NRW cities visual analysis

instagram map visual analysis

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what do you frame experiment

what do you remember e

feb

mar

ap

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experiment

pr

conclusion

room of-no-attention exhibition

may

june

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