[ISEA2015] Poster: Karl Baumann – Old Tech and New Spaces: Repurposing Payphones for Community Design

Abstract (Poster)

Keywords: Participatory Design, Social Art, DIY, Urbanism, Placemaking, Residue, Social Spaces, Speculative Design.

The Leimert Phone Company is an experimental community design collective based in South Los Angeles. Our goal is to shift from designing technology for a neighborhood by planning technology as part of the neighborhood. By repurposing unused payphones and other public furniture, our designs seek to reinforce the identity of the neighborhood and create new forms of civic engagement. The collective is run through workshop teams composed of university technologists, artists, and designers who work with local artists, musicians, and concerned citizens. Members bring a variety of knowledge sets that contribute to imagining alternative systems that are culturally specific to the historically black arts community of Leimert Park. Our workshops are structured around rapid-prototyping, embodied prototyping, radical accessibility, and speculative design. In this presentation, I’ll explain the socio-cultural dynamics that inspired the collective, our methodology for maintaining a balanced participatory design process, and the impact the collective has had on reshaping public space and social relations in the neighborhood.

  • Karl Baumann, University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts, Los Angeles, CA, USA, is a digital artist, filmmaker, and scholar. His current work explores interactive and mobile media to navigate the complex layers of urban spaces. Karl’s methodology is based on addressing complex social issues through immersive, participatory projects that explore the future of civic engagement, social networks, pedagogy, and public space. After completing an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) at UC Santa Cruz (USA), Karl taught media literacy with the Boys and Girls Club and was active in Occupy Oakland. In addition to his locative and playable media projects, Karl has produced multiple award-winning documentaries and experimental videos, within the US and internationally. He is an Annenberg Fellow in the Media Arts Practice (MAP) PhD program at the University of Southern California. Karl is currently working with the Media, Activism, and Participatory Politics (MAPP) project, the World Building Media Lab (WBML), and the Annenberg Innovation Lab (AIL).

Full text (PDF) p. 941-944