Abstract
Humans experience urban spaces often through technology, for example when they navigate their ways via an app. The technologies they interact with transform the urban environment into a form of matter made of the screens, earbuds, buttons, PCB boards, and wires that constitute them. The authors propose a practice-based, educational co-design workshop to contrast high-tech smart cities with a low-tech, bot- tom-up urban sensing approach for interacting with the sonic city. They ran a workshop with local young adults in Shenzhen and built simple sound recorders partially from e-waste. Listening to the city on head- phones through wearable low-tech devices, the participants were asked to record sounds of their liking. Indoors, these sounds were then played back on the wearables’ distorting built-in loudspeakers. The au- thors detail this case from Shenzhen and argue that an educational co-design method based on low-tech urban sensing can shed knowledge on how situated embodied perception is mediated through technology.
Keywords
Urban space; Low-tech electronics; Sonic materiality; Urban sensing; Participatory workshop
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.1155
Citation
Sagesser, M.Z.,and Dong, B.(2025) Listening to the City Through Technology: A Low-Tech Perceptive Approach for Shenzhen, in Chang, C.-Y., and Hsu, Y. (eds.), IASDR 2025: Design Next, 02-05 December, Taiwan. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.1155
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Track 3 - Design, Art & Technology
Listening to the City Through Technology: A Low-Tech Perceptive Approach for Shenzhen
Humans experience urban spaces often through technology, for example when they navigate their ways via an app. The technologies they interact with transform the urban environment into a form of matter made of the screens, earbuds, buttons, PCB boards, and wires that constitute them. The authors propose a practice-based, educational co-design workshop to contrast high-tech smart cities with a low-tech, bot- tom-up urban sensing approach for interacting with the sonic city. They ran a workshop with local young adults in Shenzhen and built simple sound recorders partially from e-waste. Listening to the city on head- phones through wearable low-tech devices, the participants were asked to record sounds of their liking. Indoors, these sounds were then played back on the wearables’ distorting built-in loudspeakers. The au- thors detail this case from Shenzhen and argue that an educational co-design method based on low-tech urban sensing can shed knowledge on how situated embodied perception is mediated through technology.