In SUPERPOWER! Johannesburg, we asked students from the University of Johannesburg to consider their role as both the future generation and designers of their city. Participants worked in groups to design and carry out data collection surrounding people’s perception of public safety in the city.
Interested to collaborate or host SUPERPOWER! in your city? Visit superpower.lingql.com to find out more.
Presented at: Fak’ugesi Festival 2019
Participants design data collection experiments using the SUPERPOWER! Toolkit – a series of gesture sensing wearables that enable people to record their subjective perception of the city through performing body gestures in geolocations. The catalogued gestures relate to the topic that each group of participants want to map out. In this workshop, the topics explored were participants’ perception of safety, the public’s perception of safety and the public’s comfortability with surrounding urban infrastructure. Based on the findings from the data collection, participants discussed how they can shape Johannesburg, as a designer and citizen, and as a collective.
Topic 1: Participants’ perception of safety
From the participants:
“The theme for our group is finding out safety relative to your location. Factors include; time, gender (male/female), the area, the people in that specific area. We want to narrow down to areas that are either high-risk in crimes, low-risk areas where crimes are prone to happen, or areas where there are unwelcomed interactions from strangers, e.g people begging on the street/ “hobos”, street vendors, men in general and anyone who may initiate interactions, unwanted or wanted.
We found that certain areas’ safety is subjective to the people conducting the experiments’ judgement of characters at first glance of people that inhabit that area. Certain areas gave a sense of safety but people there might not necessarily feel safe. Another observation is that sometimes your safety is proportional to the smell of urine smelling in the area. Places that smell bad tend to be less safe.”
Topic 2: Public’s perception of safety
From the participants:
“Our focus is on public safety in different parts of town. We decided to investigate this in order to find out how different people feel in terms of safety in different locations in town. Different people were asked on how safe they felt in the city and we made the gestures in order to record the data. We crossed the Nelson Mandela bridge and walked through Bree taxi ranks, the market theatre and past Newtown junction and came back by crossing the Nelson Mandela bridge.”
Topic 3: Public’s comfortability with surrounding urban infrastructure
From the participants:
“We are investigating this because we want to find out how people will react around an uncomfortable or dirty environment. We collect this information by mimicking people’s body gestures and observation of people’s actions while walking on the streets. We made a few assumptions, for example, people tend to hold their bag close to their chest when they feel unsafe.
We observed that women had their handbags hanging off the shoulder or on their arms, as well as the backpack being held with both hands due to its weight rather than feeling unsafe. Most men with a sling bag did not feel uncomfortable, this is because there are fewer people walking around the city as it is a Sunday.”
Special thanks to:
All the students who took part in the workshop
Tutor Marin Pacheco
Tutor Martin Bolton
Fak’ugesi Festival Director Tegan Bristow
City of Johannesburg’s Smart Cities Office
SUPERPOWER! Johannesburg is a project by Ling Tan. Funded by Fak’ugesi Festival and supported by the University of Johannesburg.
