Mobile information services: enriching information architecture with urban design

Abstract

Ubiquitous wireless communications, information mobility and location-based information services have created a new layer of urban experience, an information layer. The information services that deliver this layer to the urban actor (particularly pedestrians) will soon be ubiquitous and using those services a normal and integral part of the urban experience; more than an optional and utilitarian adjunct to it. The urban setting for these services prompts the question as to whether urban designers should be playing a role in their design and development; a role that seems conspicuously absent from current services. This thesis explores mechanisms which might facilitate a greater role for urban design by seeking ways in which the information architecture that underpins these information services might better reflect the qualities and complexities of urban space that urban designers recognise and value. The work of a range of prominent urban design thinkers is reviewed for ideas, constructs and elements that can be incorporated into an enriched information architecture which could in turn deliver information services that do justice to the depth and complexity of the urban environment. Technologies and standards associated with the ‘semantic web’ are identified as those which might best accommodate an appropriate information architecture; in particular, the ability to reflect the network characteristics of urban space viewed as a multi-dimensional graph of interconnected nodes. This view of urban space is contrasted with the relatively flattened view offered by global geo-spatial capability. An information model is built (only one of many possibilities) and validated using a limited test area in central Sydney. Practical and institutional issues which may impinge on the realisation and deployment of such a model in a real world setting are briefly considered in an appendix.