What technologies and tactics would you use to visually convey the stories of our digital lives? Which people and places would you include or exclude from those stories? In this IDeATe elective—part geographical research, part technological exploration, and part design studio—students explore a range of visualization tools and work in small teams to tell engaging, spatially rich stories for a multi-media atlas of the social, environmental, and political impacts of life in an era of ubiquitous computing.
The industrial period that defined so much of Pittsburgh’s urban history left its marks across the city and beyond. The consequences of steel production, for instance, were evident in the city’s factories and segregated housing, in its smog-filled air and smoke-stained buildings, in the highways and rail lines that connected sites of extraction, production, and consumption, and in the weary steel workers’ tired and battered bodies.
Today’s Pittsburghers are living through the transformative impact of the fourth industrial revolution, one whose rhythms are tapped out by enormous computational power and automated urban technologies. In contrast to the heavy pollution of the past, these infrastructures are often presented as fleeting, lightweight, and sustainable. But hidden behind these automated processes are places and people—the producers and users of digital infrastructure, whose workplaces, relationships to sites of resource extraction, and strategies for political and economic power are all widely varied and context dependent.
Starting from a data-driven infrastructure (like parcel delivery), students will create and showcase compelling stories that survey the uneven conditions through which that system is made and maintained. In the wake of the city’s industrial steel factories, students will explore how to tell the stories of today’s digital factories by using data visualizations, maps, videos, apps, or other media.
