SUPERPOWER!
SUPERPOWER! is an initiative that enables people to explore their relationship with their cities and complex urban issues through their own subjective perception. Working with UK as well as international communities over several years, designer and artist Ling Tan has developed SUPERPOWER! Toolkit – social, gesture-driven and data-collecting technology and digital platform that enables groups of people and communities to make sense of self-determined issues through devising data experiments that capture participants’ own perception data of their environment including data capture of subtle body gestures (which is important when people don’t want to be conspicuous in public).
How Do We Make Sense Of Issues In Our Own Environment?
Our innate subjective perception of our environment is influenced by our past experience, interaction with people and information about our city, mediated through urban infrastructures and politics, creating invisible boundaries that affect the way we navigate and act in cities. However it is often hard to make sense of, or deal with such intangible issues, even when they have very physical consequences (e.g. perception of safety). What new information can we learn about our city if our perception can be made tangible, extended and qualified like other datasets, and will we have a greater agency to tackle such issues if we are more attuned to each others’ perceptions and understanding?
SUPERPOWER! has been trialled in cities such as London (UK), Johannesburg (SA), Mombasa(KE), Bulawayo (ZW), Liverpool (UK), Cluj-Napoca (RO), Manchester (UK), Bristol(UK) and Matsudo(JP) and involved collaboration with NGOs and arts organisations such as Hivos, Fakugesi Digital Innovation Festival, Furtherfield and FACT.
SUPERPOWER! is an initiative developed by Ling Tan with the support of many organisations over the years.
