Introduction This folio presents the Polis Project -Geo Soapbox. This was one of the design projects within the Mediating Place Programme 3 of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Project. The project began in 2007 and ended in 2012, the overall programme has produced empirically grounded, interdisciplinary research on changing media spaces and design, focusing on five main disciplinary areas across Goldsmiths: Programme 1: Spaces of News - researching the impact of the internet on journalism. Programme 2: Metadata In The Age of Ubiquitous Data - investigating the properties of metadata in digital media. Programme 3: Mediatising Place - understanding the creative applications of the internet for civic purposes. Programme 4: Europe in Motion - researching shifting media geographies and identities in Europe. Programme 5: Tracking the Moving Image - exploring the restructuring of public space by image technologies in Cairo, Shanghai and London. The sum of the whole programme has produced a wide research impact with numerous publications, public lectures, held annual symposia and a final threeday conference to present work publicly and promote feedback. While each programme has been autonomous, they also connect to each other. Combined, they present a complex picture of transformation, possibility and continuity in terms of new media s relationship to society, offering a way out of the simple binarism that has previously limited the field of digital studies. Left: Polis Geo Soapbox design
Introduction The engagement with 19-25 year old users in politics was at the time and continues to be generally very low. The under 25s are massively affected by their lack of representation and power in most political contexts, yet they as a group are probably the least well equipped to be able to protect themselves against the political fallout of a global recession. The Community Development Foundation (CDF) in Background to Youth Disaffection highlighted in its report. 20 years ago nearly half of all school leavers went straight into employment and that today, the figure stands at less than 1 in 10. The collapse of the youth labour market can be seen to have impacted particularly hard on the identity of working class young men who, in the words of one education expert, are left feeling unwanted and useless in the new economy. It was felt that if projects like the Polis could help equip this group with better political engagement skills, and offer tools to support them, they would be able to participate in our democracy more effectively. A large number of this age group are also very comfortable with these emerging forms of technology, and in particular social networking services like twitter that are incorporated within the technology of the Polis geo-soapbox. Left: A sketch model of the political issue of the NHS Bill. This sketch describes some of the ideas about how to visually represent a geographical political issue, and the possible actions that could be done to solve the political problem.
Conceptual Development The project began with the exploration of how political opinion is represented in public contexts and how to build confidence in public participation. Drawings, including the one shown on the near left, were used to extend and explore how we represent political opinion. On the left is a drawing of a fence that can record voice, the concept was based on non technological and traditional public prayer fences from China and Japan. There are many difficulties to enabling the public represent their views to others, so we drew on existing examples found in organised religion that solve part of this problem. We conducted mapping workshops within our research to explore these issues, and generate possible solutions that were investigated through the project. A key process within our research was the use of iterative prototyping of sketch models, and then the development of fully working mockups to test our concepts. We conducted experiments into learning, by holding facilitated workshops with theatre professionals to explore how users could gain confidence is presenting an argument and public speaking. We learnt that teaching people the building blocks of argument construction, and practicing public speaking, our users confidence grew in presenting political issues. We deployed a prototype to an a live political protest, which highlighted the requirement for our design to encourage people to perform with it. Using a soapbox format and a theatrical 1920 s microphone, people were drawn to make public speeches. In the reflection and analysis of the prototype it became clear that the ability to record speech, and allow an audience to ask live questions was important. People wanted to continue adding feedback to issues after the event. In the final iteration we incorporated a screen for the audience and a ipad application for the speaker, this allowed recording. These recordings could be uploading to our database. Also a twitter feed was displayed to the speaker and the audience to allow live questions. The recorded speech was linked as a resource to our online database. This Polis database managed all of the constructed blocks of an argument. Right: Drawings from the sketch book- exploring the idea of the soapbox packing into a suitcase, and Digital message fence.
Spatial arguments... Conceptual Development In order to understand the construction of the building blocks of an argument, we studied various political speeches, and came to argumentation theory, and in particular the Toulmin model. In order to teach argument construction we experimented with Toulmin s model within our workshops. The Toulmin model is made up of the following parts: Claim: the position or claim being argued for; the conclusion of the argument. Grounds: reasons or supporting evidence that bolster the claim. Warrant: the principle, provision or chain of reasoning that connects the grounds/reason to the claim. Backing: support, justification, reasons to back up the warrant. Rebuttal/Reservation: exceptions to the claim; description and rebuttal of counter-examples and counter-arguments. Qualification: specification of limits to claim, warrant and backing. Drawing right: Spatialisation of an argument; Are you on the fence? The lack of public engagement with political arguments was a major concern of the project. Through this project we were encouraging a form of participatory democracy. This required a consideration of how to encourage people to make and express an opinion. The political fence was also an important illustration of the representation of different opinions within a political argument. The idea of being undecided or lacking a position was a point of interest. The research found that people in our workshops were not confident about revealing differences of opinion which stifled any further dialogue. We proposed that by connecting the physical locations of issues, we could identify and reveal political differences and open more dialogue between people, communities and organisations.
Primary Research Project workshops were held to explore the development of skills in public speaking and argument construction. Within the workshops there were also experiments with using automated colour recognition to index peoples participation in the argument. The Geo soapbox software was designed to calibrate the amount of red or green held up by the audience, either to disagree or agree with what was being said. There was also the introduction a twitter feed at the bottom of the screen for live questions. These opinions traces were recorded throughout the talk could be indexed alongside the audio recording of the speech, allowing users to interrogate the audience reaction to the speaker at any point during their speech. It was found that as a result of the workshops that the geo-soapbox successfully encouraged people to stand up and contribute to a discussion, and it was a useful tool in developing confidence in public discussion. The use of working prototypes was essential in the development of the project. Top left: User speaking to the audience. Top right: Audience responding to the speaker. Bottom left: User engaging with audience. Bottom right: Polis Geo-Soapbox prototype.
Development & Making The materiality and sensitivity of the treatment of the technology was also significant. The project team was invited to present the prototypes to the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge, after their researchers had seen our prototypes at Make Believe, a public exhibition in Covent Garden, which was part of the London Design Festival in 2009. Microsoft were particularly interested in our invention of Shaker-Tech which used materials like Oak alongside LCD screens, and utilised furniture design principals taken from Shaker furniture making from the 19th Century. In our trials we found that people found this material language accessible. At that time in 2009 Microsoft were working on digital heirloom technology to help people record and preserve oral histories connected to photographs. Based on our project, they adopted this shaker-tech, which are shown at the bottom left within the images on this page. Left top: Early sketch models and a later full size Shaker-Tech Geo-Soapbox using Oak and electronic recording technology. Bottom left: Microsoft Research s Digital Heirloom project. Material language use.
Development & Making The Polis software was researched and developed as a geo-spatial database, enabling the current political landscape of the UK to be represented as political wards. Wards are an administrative division of a city or borough that typically elects and is represented by a councillor or councillors. Within Polis each of the ward s political arguments could be represented and categorised. The project used the current government departments and their responsibilities to make categories of argument. We wanted the political discussions to connect directly with the responsibilities of ministers and departments within the governement. It was also considered that the construction by Polis of each argument would also allow experts and non-governmental opinion, to become part of the discussion, and add more inclusivity in politics. Through the research it was discovered that a minister would need to read thousands of pages of documents to be fully informed for a weeks worth of commons discussions and bill reading. This we felt was actually impossible for any minister to be able to successfully achieve, and therefore as a system of democracy it was very inefficent. Using multiuser commons based discussions seemed to offer a better way of building participation in these bills and debates. A user could zoom into a particular local, national or Uk wide view and explore discussions at different geographical scales. Top left: Interface showing the whole of the UK. To explore UK level political issues. Bottom Left: Showing local level political issues map.
Development & Making London wards were also added as a scaled section to the Polis map. Here is an example of the overview headlines of a particular argument about Forestry in the 21st Century. A user could search for particular issues or just browse through them by category or location. It was also possible to tweet references to these issues or add them to a facebook page. Left: Interface showing London based political issues. Right: Showing a overview of an issue.
Development & Making Here is an example of adding a new argument with each section of the argument mapped out to help a user construct their point of view. Assets could be added to each of the sections, like recorded speeches, images existing reports and associated documents. The database was fully working and based on drupel, an open source database software architecture. The interaction with mapping was built in adobe flash and accessed as a web page online. Left: Interface showing how to start an argument! Right: Showing a closeup of the Geo Soapbox Mic 3d Print
Output in Action As part of the project the prototype was deployed at a political protest. Gathering actual use examles helped in the development of the Geo-Soapbox, whilst actually supporting the discussions and speeches of the protest. In the evaluation of the event, we thought it was important to give control over the recordings of speeches and to capture user comments by the audience. This was achieved through new software development, and by a screen attached to the soapbox. This screen based interaction and software was added to the final iteration of the Polis Geo-Soapbox. These speech files generated by the Geo Soapbox are added as resources to a particular argument and geolocation within the online Polis database. The trial shown left was part of the student fees protest, and facilitated about 20 speakers to make a speech. These were uploaded online using soundcloud and tagged, although it was difficult to know how many people accessed the recordings, they were played in an exhibition of the project at the Mediating Public Spaces public exhibition and forum in November 2010. Left: Deployment of the Polis Geo Soapbox at a political event.
Dissemination & Outreach The Polis Project was presented at the Mediating Public Spaces public exhibition and forum. The aim was to communicate the research work to a wider audience, demonstrate working prototypes of the Geo soapbox, and allow people to interact with them. The Polis project- Geo Soapbox as a prototype connected to the wider range of interdisciplinary research particularly between Design and Media Communication. The work was presented in a number of public exhibitions that not only communicated the research work to that point, but also to gain more feed back from a wider audience. We invited international scholars as visiting speakers to talk about and extend our research question of how to encourage political participation, and proposals for the future. Our International Guests were invited to the our Annual Symposium & Exhibition 28 November 2010, New Academic Building, Goldsmiths, University of London, SE14 6NW Left: The Poster for the symposium and exhibition.