Urban Informatics: The End is Here!
Author: Drew Phillips
Project: IIHS and IIIT-B | Urban Informatics Portal
Year: 2015
Bangalore, India
We’re proud to say that we completed our project on schedule and with more functionalities than we originally planned! Reaching out to different organizations was the hardest but most productive part of our project. Our team contacted many organizations for their advice and, in particular, what they would like to see in a product like ours. We were inspired to make our project more than a simple visualization tool; our final product allows for visual analysis of pricing between apartments and their areas.
Broadening our scope increased our chances of success and served as a learning opportunity. In the future, I think that all of our team members will search for input from many different sources for their product… Especially if those sources challenge our preconceptions or make a lot of completed work irrelevant (this happened several times).
Personally, I learned just as much from the ways that our project could be improved. I read “Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology” by Kentaro Toyama after I returned from Bangalore. Dr. Toyama studies technological social interventions and why they fail. What allows a digital intervention to succeed, in his opinion, is:
Project: IIHS and IIIT-B | Urban Informatics Portal
Year: 2015
Bangalore, India
We’re proud to say that we completed our project on schedule and with more functionalities than we originally planned! Reaching out to different organizations was the hardest but most productive part of our project. Our team contacted many organizations for their advice and, in particular, what they would like to see in a product like ours. We were inspired to make our project more than a simple visualization tool; our final product allows for visual analysis of pricing between apartments and their areas.
Broadening our scope increased our chances of success and served as a learning opportunity. In the future, I think that all of our team members will search for input from many different sources for their product… Especially if those sources challenge our preconceptions or make a lot of completed work irrelevant (this happened several times).
Personally, I learned just as much from the ways that our project could be improved. I read “Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology” by Kentaro Toyama after I returned from Bangalore. Dr. Toyama studies technological social interventions and why they fail. What allows a digital intervention to succeed, in his opinion, is:
- A relationship of the project to an established movement or social desire
- A team that continues to interface between the project and the people who use it
