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CityTraces – tracing a festival of design movers

20 July 2011 CIIC news VIC

CityTraces invites festival-goers to use their smartphones to trace their city movements as part of the 2011 State of Design Festival in Victoria this July (20-31st).

Sponsored by the Creative Industries Innovation Centre at the University of Technology, Sydney, the CityTraces project aims to map the way festival participants interact with the city – what modes of transport are used, what bottlenecks are experienced when moving between events, and how people move from the festival to other spaces and events.

Participants can download a free CityTraces app from the Apples iTunes Store for use with iPhones and iPad devices. Participants who map more than an hour of their festival movements will go into a draw to win a free iPad 2, generously donated by the University of Wollongong to encourage participation in the event.

The CityTraces app has been designed and developed by Dr. Chris Brennan-Horley, a researcher based at the University of Wollongong who uses GIS to explore the relationships between creative industries and Australian cities.

According to Brennan-Horley: “GPS is becoming an ever-prevalent part of our lives, as GPS chips are found in an increasing variety of mobile devices used for navigating and social networking. This project is interested in how this technology be used to create crowd-sourced visualisations and collaborative maps of our collective movements through the urban landscape”. 

In an age of satellite navigation and Google Maps, we now have the opportunity to show that our cities are as much about everyday events and social life as they are about buildings and streets. By showing these social movements, new maps can be used by urban planners and designers to better understand the workings of cities as social spaces of movement and interaction.

The project’s designated mapping day is July 30, which coincides with a number of festival events encouraging participants to explore the city – including Melbourne Open House, Mapping the Burbs, and the Gertrude St Projection Festival.

Participants can use the CityTraces app to send in maps of their festival movements. All the information sent in by participants will be completely anonymous. Depersonalised user data will be used to create visualisations of collective movements – capturing aspects of people’s movements like heat maps, which show the densities of participants, speed graphs and visualizations by profession, transport mode and so forth. Whether attending the Festival in Melbourne, Bendigo or Ballarat, participants can use the CityTraces app to map the contours of their festival experience.

Cartographers unite!

Get involved if you’re interested in how digital mapping techniques can be used to provoke new ways of visualising your city. While the project is soft-launching at Victoria's State of Design Festival, don't feel neglected if you're based in another city. CityTraces is intended to be used as a collaborative platform for ongoing spatial mapping projects right across the country. And we're open to your ideas!

Find out more about the project at http://citytraces.com.au
Facebook: http://facebook.com/citytraces
Twitter: www.twitter.com/citytraces
Email: info@citytraces.com.au

Those without an iPhone try out one of the recommended apps developed for Android here.