The next phase of the smart city movement is already upon us. The move to make our cities more intelligent began with an IT-enabled, systems-driven approach: creating efficiencies through digitizing information, optimizing traffic systems, and using data-driven dashboards to aid decision making. But now, we're beginning to use new technologies to support the entrepreneurial, the spontaneous, the creative, and the humane.

This is the rise of the socially driven smart city...

Read more of our guest post at the UBM Future Cities website

You may have seen the TED talk by the London based data journalist and information designer, David McCandless, where he states that "information is beautiful". Here at Re:Imagine Group we agree with this statement, but we think it needs to be taken one step further. We believe that "interaction with information should be beautiful", particularly when you are accessing information on-the-go. That is why we are launching a new project that uses augmented reality to make interacting with real-time bus information at the bus stop, easy and even delightful.

Many of us have experienced it: You're waiting for the bus, you own a smart phone and you want to know when the next bus is coming. If your city has a lot of money, they might have installed LED signs (costly, and quite frankly, ugly). If not, you are left with a number of apps and websites that will tell you when the bus is arriving.

The problem is, interacting with these sites and apps is not beautiful - you have to know the number of the bus you want, which stop you are at, where you need to go and you need to input all of this information on a tiny screen.

A few weeks ago, I ran a 'Delighting with Data' workshop at the Augmented Reality conference, VOX: the 4D summit - presented by a local Augmented Reality company named Daqri. My team and I decided that AR, far from being a gimmick, could be used to make accessing bus information seamless, and even sexy. We also realized that in doing so, we were dealing with a unique branding opportunity for the city.

The slides above document the process. The 'lite' version starts with placing a branded and individualized sticker at each bus-stop*. You simply open the app, hold it up to the sticker and you can then scroll through information (on your phone's screen) about which buses are coming next. If you click on one of the information panels, additional route information appears. It's that simple. The sticker is the unique branding opportunity for the city or other sponsors and it costs next to nothing.

The extended version of the service allows users to hold their phone to a service map. This time, you see an overlay of where you are and which buses are coming towards you. Many apps provide information about when the next bus is coming but few apps provide the ability to do on-the-go route planning. Our service solves this, beautifully.

To build a prototype of this service, we need access to real-time bus data (which exists in many cities, but we would love to pilot in LA), some money (we're crowdfunding), and champions in local government.

Lastly, for those without smartphones we are considering having a number that regular phones can text. What do you think? necessary?

* It should be noted that while we have used LA's Metro logo on the sticker in the slides above, this is simply a mock-up and we are not affiliated with Metro (yet).

Post by Christine Outram

When San Francisco's head of Public Works came to the 2011 Urban Prototyping event, The Summer of Smart he made an interesting observation:

"Wherever I see graffiti, I don't see public art and wherever I see public art, I don't see graffiti".

For the participants at the event, this was easily fixed. All they had to do was create a 'dating app'! It would match building owners who had blank walls with artists in the local area, thereby cutting down on graffiti and promoting public art.

With this simple premise, a small team set about to create a web platform named 'Art Here'. Over one weekend they perfected their pitch and ended up being one of the five winning projects at the Summer of Smart.

It could have all stopped there, but with help from Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA) the group developed their idea, made an alliance with the non-profit Art and Technology Network Zero1 and have used their platform to launch art projects in Silicon Valley and San Jose. Now, San Francisco projects are in the pipeline.

One of the biggest problems with the Art Here concept was permitting. It was difficult for artists that used traditional mediums (namely paint) to get permission from the city to design and execute a public mural. For the moment, Art Here is getting around restrictions by nurturing relationships with artists and community innovators who use more ephemeral techniques - sound, visualizations, projections and temporary installations.

Art Here projects include a conversion of an unused shopfront into a temporary yoga studio,  an augmented reality art piece on the lawns of the Palo Alto Arts commission and a digitally fabricated sculpture for the 'Liquid Agency'.

Post by Christine Outram

> Read the article in Fast Co Exist
> www.arthere.org

It is estimated that 30% of fuel is consumed by cars circling the block looking for parking.
But what if you had an application that could tell you the likelihood of getting a parking spot at a particular times of day and even let you book that spot when you were nearby?

This describes Sure Park, a business in development and one of the 5 winners of the Urban Prototyping (UP) Festival held in Singapore during June 2012.

The UP Festival was designed to get city stakeholders and innovators together to discuss pressing urban issues. It culminated at the UP weekend, a hackathon in which in thirty teams of approximately 8 people each prototyped new civic products and services for the city.

For three weeks teams had access to both public and private data sets. This included map information from Singapore's OneMap, telecommunications data from Singtel, taxi-trip information, and transit ridership information.

The Sure Park team used one year's worth of data from Metro Parking, which uses sensors to keep track of the number of cars coming into and of their lots.

One of the Sure Park team members, currently the second best data analyst in the world (according to the popular platform named Kaggle that hosts renowned data prediction competitions) led the team in building what they call a "predictive analytics model". The model powers an app that will tell you, based on historical records and current availability, the likelihood of getting a parking spot at any time of day.

The team toyed with the idea of being able to then be able to book a parking spot from home but decided this would not promote through-put. Instead, they are working on a system that allows you to book when you are close by to the destination.

Sure Park is one of three applications developed during the UP Singapore weekend that is currently being scaled into a real business.

Post by Christine Outram