altWarhol

Workshops, activities, and an online resource guide to promote and foster local art practice

Website: altwarhol.maphub.com

The goal of the altWarhol project is two-fold. First, to promote the arts to city residents and visitors, and foster connections and collaborations between individuals and organizations involved in the arts. Second, to establish and promote ongoing dialogue between the Warhol museum and the community, particularly those groups and individuals involved in the arts and advocacy. While the project is current and ongoing, to date it has manifested in workshops, a set of individual activities, and an online resource guide. All aspects of the project are undertaken in collaboration with museum's education staff.

The online resource guide includes documentation of local assets and events, featured projects, artists, and organizations, and an interactive map. The workshops serve to promote creative critical engagement with everyday life and explore alternative practices ranging from urban gardening to scavenging for art supplies. Each workshop includes a variety of visual materials and simple games to enliven engagement with the subject matter, as well as post-event online and print documentation.

A set of activities was designed to engage artists and organization on a more individual level than possible through the workshop or online resource guide. Most successful among these were ‚'cultural probes' designed to elicit subjective interpretation of the city. The probes were assembled in plain white boxes and contained maps of the city, stickers, a disposable camera, and a set of evidence bags accompanied with a ticket asking people to collect materials representative to their work and neighborhoods, and place them in the evidence bags. The use of a white box was purposively ironic, referencing the 'white cube' of the modernist museum. Participants were in encouraged to decorate or modify their box as they saw fit.

Alternative Transportation Festival Scavenger Hunt

Using the Gumband platform to create a one day SMS-based scavenger hunt with online real-time progress tracking

Website: www.gumband.com

DeepLocal provided a new twist on an old game by collaborating with the organizers of the first Alternative Transportation Festival in Pittsburgh to create a mobile scavenger hunt. Participants were invited to participate in a three day event that asked them to locate over 50 locations. When a participant discovered a location, marked by a unique four character text code, a text message containing the code would be sent to a local phone number. By texting the code, participants were logging their movement and racking up points.

The project served as a functional prototype for a larger Gumband supported tool that will allow for custom scavenger hunt creation.

Pittsburgh Bike Map

Collaborating with local street cyclists, we created a printed map to illustrate safer routes that connect the 80+ neighborhoods of Pittsburgh

We worked collaboratively with bicycle safety advocacy group Bike Pittsburgh to create the city’s first bike map in over fifteen years. We started by reviewing other city cycling maps as well as the numerous print maps of Pittsburgh that exist. We elected to create a map that detailed nearly every street in the city.

Recommended bike routes include hill information and trail connector information for potential commuters.

Custom illustrations and a comic accompany the map to help provide instructions and safety information for street cyclists.

The print map, which is widely distributed and has received much attention, will be accompanied by an online version.

Pittsburgh Bike Crash Hub

Enabling the distribution collection and sharing of information to promote bicycle safety

Bike-PGH is a local bicycling advocacy group dedicated to improving the quality of bicycling as transportation in Pittsburgh. One of their activities is to maintain a record of bicycle accidents. This record is important because often bicycle accidents involve hit-and-run behaviors or for other reasons go unreported to the police. Additionally, many bicycle accidents occur because of hazardous road conditions such as potholes or poorly marked construction. The number of safety incidents involving bicyclists is under-represented in “official” city statistics. The Bike-PGH "Hit Hub" on the MapHub platform allowed Bike-PGH to collect and share data in a novel and valuable way.

To facilitate the collection of accident data, we created an online form that allows people to enter information about a bicycle accident. This information is delivered to Bike PGH via email and posted to the “Hit Hub." An important aspect of the hub design is that it allows for custom fields to be created so as to capture and display community specific information. In creating their data entry forms, Bike-PGH could include questions such as “Were you wearing a helmet?” and “If dark, did you use bike lights?”

Once the accidents are marked on the map as objects, they can be viewed by anyone and commented on by any member of the hub. This allows for three things. First, it makes the data public in a compelling manner. Rather than storing the data in a spreadsheet or just displaying it as a list of locations and dates, the data is visually situated on the streets of Pittsburgh and available to anyone with internet access. Second, it allows people viewing the map to visually discern places where reported accidents occur, potentially providing additional meaning and value to the data by putting it in geographical context. Finally, beyond being compelling, it documents and presents the data in form that is common to a broad range of Bike-PGH stakeholders, including The City of Pittsburgh Department of City Planning. Within City Planning, maps are a common form of data collection and aggregation and the basis for decision-making. The MapHub platform allows Bike-PGH to participate in constructing evidence that can be used to communicate with the city and be used by the city in evaluating bicycling policies and determining new courses of action.

Post-Gazette.com

Site redesign and process updates for southwestern PA’s leading paper

Website: post-gazette.com

A close collaborative relationship with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette helped us to re-launch a website that had not seen a major update in over five years. In addition to a visual redesign, process and data storage updates were made and new technologies invented to make better use of very vibrant content being collected daily.

Gigapan

A prototype interface and community website to a new panoramic photo technology

Website: gigapan.com

Working with university researchers from both ends of the country, DeepLocal designed and built the prototype web site for the display and sharing of complex gigapixel panoramic images created with a new robotic camera mount technology developed at CMU.

The technology and site is being used by BBC reporters, National Geographic, and others and it’s contents were recently adopted by Google as a permanent layer on their Google Earth platform.

GOKIZ

Promoting resources and managing private information for university entrepreneurs

Website: gokiz.maphub.com

Hill District Walking Map

Working to promote selected routes in a city neighborhood

Website: thehill.maphub.com

Working with the Hill House Association, DeepLocal created an online resource map for the neighborhood that highlighted selected and approved walking routes for residents.

To coincide with a local health fair, DeepLocal illustrated the online routes in the real world by marking routes according to level of difficulty with appropriately colored balloons throughout the street of the neighborhood.

Homewood Resources

Documenting the assets of a community in their own terms and supporting multi-organization collaboration

Website: homewood.maphub.com

The Homewood MapHub is an ongoing project to document the past, present, and future of the Homewood-Brushton Neighborhood through collective asset mapping. The Homewood MapHub project is directed by the East Side Community Collaborative (ESCC): a community organization charged with facilitating collaborations between the over 50 community organizations that serve residents of the Homewood-Brushton neighborhood. The Homewood MapHub project has been instrumental in assisting the ESCC in achieving its goals of serving the community.

For the ESCC, the asset mapping project had two primary goals. The first goal was to document the rich and varied resources of Homewood-Brushton from the perspective of residents and the community organizations that represent and serve them. Following from a progressive model of assets these resources included both the official institutions and services such as the YMCA and WIC as well as the tacit knowledge and native social and cultural capital of Homewood-Brushton. The second goal of the project was to make the documentation of these assets widely available to community organizations, community leaders, social workers and to individual residents. Beyond providing knowledge of and access to these assets, the value of local resources are amplified by more frequent and regular use, which also produces opportunities for synergistic activities among residents and between organizations.

The open and adaptable structure of the MapHub platform supported the needs of the ESCC in ways other GIS systems could not. Because the MapHub platform allows for end-user object type creation, the ESCC was able to define and create custom categories to document the unique assets of Homewood-Brushton. Thes categories, which were important to the identity of the community, could not be accommodated in existing asset or social service mapping platforms. In addition, the DeepLocal team collaborated with the ESCC to produce a print brochure from the GIS. The online map was a phenomenal success in collecting resources, but in order to reach a broad base of residents, the ESCC needed to present its data offline as well as online. To accomplish this goal, DeepLocal was able to translate the database from an spatialized map to a print brochure that could distributed to and used by individuals without internet access. In this way, DeepLocal and the ESCC were able to innovate together to serve the needs of the community.

MapMover

An interactive system that combines a GIS with a physical display for collective expression

MapMover was an interactive system that allowed participants to produce a kinetic and audio expression of the city by collecting and playing field recordings which were visualized on a large-scale physical map using a mechatronic device and LED cursor. MapMover was commissioned as part of the international exhibition “Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy” at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany in 2005.

MapMover had three components: a telephone call-in system, a Hub in the MapHub application to store audio recordings, and physical display to dynamically represent data from that Hub. By calling a local phone number, participants made field recordings at locations around Pittsburgh using their mobile phones. These field recordings took many forms: documenting the various sounds of the city, short audio art pieces, or simply commenting on places or events.

Participants input the location of the field recording by street address or intersection. The field recording was then uploaded to the MapHub system, tagged to the given geographic location, and accessible for playback or comments from the MapHub website. The MapMover physical display played back these sounds and highlighted their location on a 4’ x 6’ wall mounted map of Pittsburgh. The system continuously queried the MapHub database to retrieve the next sound in the queue. Using two computer controlled servo motors, the display moved an LED mounted on a puck and suspended by two wires behind the translucent wall mounted map to the location of the next sound and then played that sound. Throughout the exhibition sounds were contributed to the database and the system cycled through the sounds chronologically.

Trailposts

Extending collaborative mapping and GIS to the hiking community

Trailposts.com was developed as a way for hikers to share images, comments and information with one another, as well as to publicize their journeys to friends and family around the world. Trailposts was built using technology developed by the MapHub project and allows for close collaboration of a community — geographically or culturally linked — through a shared online map and database. Most significantly, Trailposts.com exemplifies the malleability of the MapHub platform by extending the concept and the technology to a rural domain and specialized user-base.

Broadly, TrailPosts.com was developed as a way of promoting route based activity for outdoor sports and leisure activities. The first application of the Trailposts system was to document the 2,000+ mile Appalachian Trail and serve trail hiker, their friends and family. In addition to the Application Trail, any path that is pre-determined can be developed as a trail map through Trailposts system. Spots along the trail including things such as points of interest, water sources, and camping locations can be monitored and commented on with video, audio, and text by the trails’ users. In addition to rural hiking trails, other trails, such as bike paths in the city can also being mapped.

South Side Tag Tracker

Helping a neighborhood better report vandalism and document criminal behavior

Website: tagtracker.maphub.com

Working with the South Side Community Council, we created a website that allows residents to more efficiently monitor their own neighborhood for graffiti incidents and report information in a more standard manner to city officials. This self-monitoring also encourages residents to actively involve themselves in the protection of their own neighborhood. A recent rise in graffiti in the neighborhood is the cause of the reaction with most of the activity being very malicious in nature with little artistic value. Tagging is tracked by material and tool used (acid etching, marker, etc).