The EU COST funded CyberPark project brings together participants from 21 countries to explore how ICT can help attract more users to engage with public spaces more efficiently, enhancing their health and wellbeing. With the emergence of social media, wearable technologies and devices such as Google Glass, a future where technology is embedded in the environment and where landscapes respond to the people who pass through them may no longer be just science fiction fantasy. The CyberPark project will explore how nature and the digital can be brought closer together, drawing on the expertise of urban planners, architects, anthropologists and researchers from the arts and humanities.
Bronwen Thomas, Sue Thomas and Sam Goodman will all be contributing to the four-year project from May 2014. Bronwen Thomas is Director of the Centre and an Associate Professor in the Media School. She has published widely on new media narratives and organized the Location-based Storytelling symposium here at BU in 2012. Sue Thomas is a Visiting Fellow in the Media School, and recently published a book on Technobiophilia (Bloomsbury, 2013) exploring the relationship between nature and cyberspace. She is currently developing ideas around digital well-being. Sam Goodman is Lecturer in Linguistics in the Media School, with research interests in Medical Humanities and literary representations of space, place and landscape.
You can read more about the project on Sue Thomas’s new Wired Well-being column for The Conversation at https://theconversation.com/cyberparks-will-be-intelligent-spaces-embedded-with-sensors-and-computers-26837
Full details of the COST action can be found at
http://www.cost.eu/domains_actions/tud/Actions/TU1306