Big Data in the LondonScape

What's your idea?

Big Data in the LondonScape is a prominent, digital modern-day totem pole, aggregating and displaying Londoner’s data, revealing the collective state of London.

Imagine as you travel in to work in the morning, looking over at the South Bank or another similar public space in the city, and seeing in real-time how Londoners are feeling that day. The digital totem pole will show four faces of London: of mood, of people’s pathways, of people’s connections and of consumption.

Our mood can be captured through existing apps like Mappiness and Moodscope; our pathways can be captured through Oyster check-ins; our connections could look at phone data; and our consumption could be captured via energy partnerships.

The potential social impact of this will be a City full of data literate, digitally savvy and collectively aware Londoners, willing to acknowledge our interconnectedness as citizens and the collective impact we have both as consumers and as people contributing to the mood of our cityscape. Data will no longer be something to dismiss or be afraid of but a powerful tool, accessible for all, to play with, to hack and to draw meaning from. We’ll be aware of how we are each contributing to the community of London and see how we are part of something much bigger.

When were the first seeds of the idea sown?

We believe the second decade of the 21st century is epitomised by Big Data. From the status updates, friendship connections and preferences generated by Facebook and Twitter to search strings on Google, locations on mobile phones and purchasing history on store cards.

The systems used to make sense of the information are starting to make sophisticated connections and learn patterns, forming a vast web of the collective state. Advocates and enthusiasts of Big Data view this as an opportunity to observe behaviours in real time, draw real-time conclusions and affect real-time change. However, in the same way that Race On Line has worked hard to make access to the Web a civil right, in the next Decade, not being data literate has the potential to also create social disadvantage and disempowerment.

Creating a very visible, beautiful, public display of Londoners' collective data is a way of creating greater awareness - engaging the public, as generators of their own data, with how to interpret it and see the potential meaning (and manufacturing potential) in it.

Who have you invited to dinner in a room for london to help develop the idea?

We’ve invited:

Tassos Stevens, a Co-director of Coney - an agency of adventure making live interactive crossplatform play, and a community of artists and makers through play. He's also an award-winning theatre director and maker, writer and game-designer with a doctorate in psychology. We’re hoping Tassos can help us think about how people will engage, play and interact with the idea.

Aleks Krotoski is s an academic and journalist who writes about and studies technology and interactivity. She is the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s The Digital Human science series and The Guardian’s Tech Weekly Podcast. We’re hoping Aleks can connect what we’re designing in to the wider cultural context and inform us of the leading thinking and tech in this space.

Matt Jones is a Principal at BERG and has been delivering digital products and services since 1995. He studied architecture and has written on interaction design, robots and technology. Berg are specialists at merging the digital world with the physical world. We’re hoping Matt can bring some of the Berg magic to help us develop the concept in to a working and inventive prototype.

Oliver O’Brien is a researcher and software developer at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), an interdisciplinary research group at UCL in London. He is part of the GENeSIS team, investigating and implementing new ways to visualise spatial data. He also created City Dashboard which we came across after we’d submitted our idea. We’re hoping that Oliver would like to partner with us in some way as he’s already built relationships with data sources and knows a huge amount more than we do!

Paul Bennun is CEO of Somethin Else. Somethin' Else is the UK's leading content design and creation company. Confident across many platforms and reaching millions of people every day with its games, radio, TV and interactive entertainment, it works with the largest brands and broadcasters solving problems with content. We’re hoping Paul will bring his vast wealth of experience in pubic engagement and broadcast to our design proposition.

What single thing would you like to happen that evening to help your idea get off the ground?

We’d like to leave the boat the next morning with a really clear blueprint of what next.
This blueprint will guide us to make the idea happen – so we will have collectively designed the experience, the brief for the technology, the brief for the structure/product, the brief for the data streams, thought about the political and social context & agenda, have a list of partners and people to approach, considered funding possibilities and feel hugely inspired about how it will look, interact, and have an impact!

How would you describe your relationship to London?

London is like a playground, a university and a sacred site. It’s a vibrant place full of adventure and possibility, a place rich for learning and it also has it vulnerabilities that need care. We want to contribute to the city and connect people to it, as much as we want to connect people to one another.

How are you feeling about spending the night on board?

Who would not feel incredibly excited? A Room for London is an example of everything that is great about this city: its creativity, tenacity and beauty. The ability to be in a unique building, which stands like a panoptican tower over the city is the best place to imagine a collective London, to bring all of its variety together, to dream a sense of the collective and how that might be best displayed. It’s a perfect place to develop the vision.