Designing social tools for the bees, the buzz and the beehive

Abstract

Urban master-planned communities, designed for demographically mixed populations, do not necessarily give rise to meaningful social interactions that enable residents to take advantage of social and cultural diversity. This paper discusses design considerations emerging from an ongoing case study that investigates how living in a diverse master-planned community influences residents’ communicative ecology. The challenge of the study is to create a design intervention that can not only facilitate the collection, visualisation and analysis of data for researchers, but also promote social connectivity among residents of the Kelvin Grove Urban Village (KGUV), Brisbane, Australia. By leveraging mashups and interest in participatory culture, it may be possible to create a novel dynamic visualisation that can capture the social, discursive and technological characteristics—“the bees, the buzz and the beehive”—of urban communities. This has the potential to create a powerful analytical research tool for user-centred,
participatory research that brings us one step closer to
understanding the ever-changing communicative ecology of our
research participants. It may also reveal innovative ways in
which we can use social media to support the social
sustainability of diverse urban neighbourhoods.