The city at hand: media installations as urban information systems

This paper describes an approach to design a novel system for presenting data related to a city in an intuitive and metaphorical way. By using interactive surfaces and the coupling of information with graspable physical objects, urban data, maps and live sensors built around the physical model of a city can be used to engage discourse and civil participation. This research group aims to create new media installations for bridging the gap between citizen and urban data. In this research, we realized two installations named "Changing Linz" and "SimLinz". By providing different interaction modalities to generate and visualize views of datasets, the systems support new insights on statistical and real-time information of a city. The paper is a case study of urban information presentation systems that were built for public installations in the city of Linz.