Creative urban technologies: Exploring and Navigating the Smart and Social City

Course goals

After successful completion of the course, the student has:

• Develop an understanding of key issues at the nexus of digital media and urban culture.
• Become acquainted with critical debates about creative cities, as well as a range of affirmative emergent perspectives on critical creative practices.
• Become familiarized with a hands-on and practice-based ‘critical making’ approach to address these issues through the design of and reflection on a concrete project.

After successful completion of the course the student is able:

• Identify standpoints in the debates about creative technologies and urban culture.
• Articulate their own position in these interdisciplinary debates.
• Develop their own practice-based research-by-design project that addresses one of these debates.
• Present their ideas and concepts in written and oral form, during a presentation and in a research report.

Content

• Urban Interfaces & Data: Citizen sensing, navigating, and authoring the city with location-based technologies and interactive cartography, quantified self, life-logging and mobile story-telling.
• City & Play: Reprogramming the city with urban play and ludic engagements/encounters in the city.
• Citizenship: Leveraging the creative potential of cities through participatory culture, co-creation, and open data.
  Critical Making: Prototyping creative critiques of the smart city with alternative city-making and do-it-yourself approaches with the help of new media technologies and media art.
• Research-by-design: Using practice-based prototyping methods to address urban issues and phenomena.
   

Additional information

Priority rules
This course has priority rules and a waiting list. Your enrolment is guaranteed if you

- are a student in the BA Media and Culture and this course is part of your specialisation (verdiepingspakket)
- are a student in the BA Liberal Arts and Sciences or Taal- en Cultuurstudies and this course is part of your specialisation (kernpakket)
- are enrolled in the Creative Cities minor
- are an exchange student and meet the course’s entry requirements
In all other situations, you will be placed on a waiting list if you enrol in this course. For any remaining slots in the course, lots are drawn among the students on the waiting list.

Early Exit option for international exchange students (5 ECTS)
Exchange students who are required to return to their home university before January, are allowed to choose an Early Exit option for this course. The Early Exit option means that students can finish the course before Christmas break, receiving 5 ECTS for the course. Students must make arrangements with the course coordinator at the start of the course.