DATAField: Strategies for Technological Resilience through Urban Prototyping

DATAField, a placemaking intervention developed in New Orleans, investigates how the synthetic integration of the making of place, the importance of citizens’ engagement, and the incorporation of digital technologies can provide an operative framework for large scale urban prototyping. Introducing models for urban hydrology management, citizen-engaged science, visualization strategies of underlying infrastructural systems, and resultant urban prototyping related to resiliency, DATAField demonstrates how digital technologies implemented through systemic approaches can be a powerful tool to design in soft-land and to strengthen citizens’ awareness of how we can live with water in vulnerable ecosystems.

In New Orleans, a city that continuously faces the challenges of living with water and unstable conditions of soft-land, the DataField project aims at synthesizing strategies for resiliency through the development of a large scale inhabitable urban prototype.

With DataField, the goal is to identify underlying deficiencies in communication systems and for citizens to become the primary actors in the construction of a public experience of space that disseminates information. The users have the opportunity to individually and collectively interpret DataField’s physical space and alter their relationships with the surrounding environment.

keywords: urban prototyping, water infrastructure, resiliency, place-making, sensing- actuating technologies