WeARLehen

The class will work with the Wikitude (a multiple award winning Augmented Reality company based in Salzburg) to create a critical/speculative design project that will culminate in a walking/online exhibition in the district of Lehen, particularly within the surround of Stadtwerk Lehen. Students will participate in specific roles within this project to facilitate personal interests and skill sets, including general roles such as promotion, ideas development, prototyping, design and development, as well as creating an individual solution, in the form of a small application, to be included in single downloadable application, powered by the Wikitude SDK. The group will curate a range of multimedia content that looks at the theme of "smart cities needing smart citizens" and how a project like this can help educate people in Salzburg to be better citizens, through technology. Wikitude is an AR platform that uses Geolocational/Image Recognition to augment rich media content. As the field of augmented reality is still quite new it is seen as generally quite novel, even shallow Advertising companies are starting to use AR more and more (IKEA for example). The WE AR LEHEN project adopted a more meaningful (critical) design approach that actually does more than making people say "wow" and buying something! The project started in November 2014 and will be completed by July 2015, with a goal of securing a showcase event consisting of a location based exhibition around the grounds of Stadtwerk Lehen, as well as a short term showcase exhibition (at a yet to be arranged location) that will act as a central hub for the event, along with displaying research documentation and facilitating the opening reception. Ideas so far for this include the Foyer at the Stadtwerk Lehen Office, the Library Foyer, the Trumerei facilites or (wetahr permitting) a public outdoor area. The project will culminate in a critically designed singular outcome that will use the Wikitude platform to produce a location specific exhibition that uses augmented reality to help create smart citizens for smarter cities. At the very least, it will bring together a diverse, culturally rich group of local citizens and engage them with their local area in a friendly, inclusive and fun way! The project is tentatively called WE AR LEHEN and will culminate in a Website, Social Media Presence, A Walking Exhibition (and hopefully a function venue that will also house project documentation), that will take place in Lehen in July 2015.