Public Benches Research Articles

Moral Engagement in Design: Five Considerations for Unpacking the Ethical Dimensions of Design Methods

Abstract What society experiences today as morally questionable design—from gendered toys for children to public benches that prevent sleeping—can be considered the aftermath of an underdeveloped foundation for systematic ethical reflection in design methodologies. Although designing is an inherently moral activity, research on how to recognize and handle ethical questions and moral dilemmas in early (conceptual) design activities is scarce. In this article, we use an interdisciplinary lens to analyze and respond to the challenges of bridging moral psychology, ethics of technology, and design methodologies. For this, we introduce the concept of moral engagement in design, which is inspired by Moral Disengagement Theory. Finally, we propose five preliminary considerations for enacting moral engagement in design practices. These considerations form an interdisciplinary bridge to help us reflect on the moral dimensions of methodological choices in conceptual design practices.

A Study on the Application of Recycled Plastic in Public Bench

A Study on the Application of Recycled Plastic in Public Bench

Ontology and Emotion in Reflexive Design Practices

Ontology and Emotion in Reflexive Design Practices

Assessing and Qualifying Neighborhood Walkability for Older Adults: Construction and Initial Testing of a Multivariate Spatial Accessibility Model.

Population aging and urban development pose major challenges for societies today. Joining the literature assessing urban accessibility, the present exploratory research developed a multivariate accessibility model based on four independent variables—related to formal and structural urban space—that influence walkability for older adults (pedestrian network; facilities and shops; public benches; and slopes and gradients). The model used ArcGIS software. For the accessibility calculations, we selected two suburban neighborhoods in the conurbation of Grenoble (France) and selected three types of older adults’ profiles to reflect the variety of aging: an older adult in good health, an older adult with a chronic disease, and an older adult with reduced mobility. The results suggest that the accessibility of a neighborhood depends not only on its physical and urban characteristics, but it is also influenced by the physical and health characteristics of its inhabitants. The originality of the model lies mainly in its ability to estimate the spatial accessibility of a territory by taking into account, firstly, objective data such as the physical characteristics and the built environment of the neighborhood through objectification variables that consider such original variables as the presence of benches or the slopes and gradients and, secondly, specific data such as the physical and/or health characteristics of the study population. The measurement of geospatial accessibility could be of great value for public health in urban contexts, which is why relevant tools and methodologies are needed to objectively examine and intervene in public spaces in order to make them age-friendly.

To Play and To Be Played: Exploring the Design of Urban Machines for Playful Placemaking

Within the paradigm of the smart and playable city, the urban landscape and street furniture have provided a fertile platform for pragmatic and hedonic goals of urban liveability through technology augmentation. Smart street furniture has grown from being a novelty to become a common sight in metropolitan cities, co-opted for improving the efficiency of services. However, as we consider technologies that are increasingly smarter, with human-like intelligence, we navigate towards uncharted waters when discussing the consequences of their integration with the urban landscape. The implications of a new genre of street furniture embedded with artificial intelligence, where the machine has autonomy and is an active player itself, are yet to be fully understood. In this article, we analyse the evolving design of public benches along the axes of smartness and disruption to understand their qualities as playful, urban machines in public spaces. We present a concept-driven speculative design case study, as an exploration of a smart, sensing, and disruptive urban machine for playful placemaking. With the emergence of artificial intelligence, we expand on the potential of urban machines to partake an increasingly active role as co-creators of play and playful placemaking in the cities of tomorrow.

The application of tensive semiotics on "street furniture", the example of the Tunisian city of Sousse.

The Arab industrial establishments specialized in the manufacture of "street furniture" units are witnessing a crisis and a cognitive deviation; for example, the "Public Bench"

A study on the problem of public bench and improvement plan through formative factor analysis

본 연구에서는 부산시민공원 벤치 디자인 조형성 요소에 대한 현황 및 문제점을 파악하기 위해 현장 및 설문 조사를 하였다. 이용자의 주관적 평가와 통계자료에 통한 실증분석한 결과는 벤치 디자인 적용 가능성이 사용가치 요구와 심미적 요구 및 지역문화 요구의 영향을 받는 것으로 확인되었다. 본 연구는 세 가지 측면으로 벤치 디자인 적용 가능성이 다양한 이용자에 주는 편안함에 대하여 분석하였다. 첫째, 공원 내에 벤치 디자인 보편성 기준이 다양한 이용자 체험에 대한 적용 가능성 문제를 분석하였다. 즉 어린이, 노인, 장애인 이용자가 벤치 크기, 높이, 등받이에 대한 체험요인이 포함된다. 둘째, 도시 문명구성에 대한 다기능 형태 벤치의 적용 가능성 문제에 대한 분석을 통하여 같은 구역 벤치에 대한 다양한 이용자의 기능요구를 해결하고 도시 문명에 영향을 미치는 비매너 행위를 막는다. 셋째, 벤치 디자인과 전체적인 공간 내 인문환경 사이의 적용 가능성 문제에 대하여, 그리고 벤치와 장소, 테마 문화 사이의 관계에 대하여 분석하였다. 본 연구는 부산 시민공원 이용자 체험 측면에서 벤치 디자인과 이용자 체험요구 사이의 문제점에 대하여 분석함으로써 시민공원 벤치 디자인의 적용 가능성 문제 개선을 위한 이론적 사례를 제시하였다.

Do you mind if I smoke here? Exploring the insights that public benches bring to public health research.

In this commentary, we illustrate how exploring the meanings and uses of everyday, seemingly mundane, public objects can advance our understanding of health-related practices and the social norms that shape them. We use the example of the public bench and smoking for this purpose. By observing the design of public benches, the places where they are found, the meanings people attribute to them, and the way people use them, we can learn what health-related practices (e.g., smoking) and who (e.g., people who smoke or who do not smoke) are included and excluded as part of local community life. We thus consider the idea that public benches can be instructive in helping us understand how our health-related practices may be shaped by what can be seen enacted on or from public benches. We ultimately demonstrate how this type of object-based experiential exploration, largely absent from public health research, can provide a novel and insightful perspective to public health research.

Distopías de Madrid. Transformación del espacio público y representación de la violencia en Sangre a borbotones de Rafael Reig y 2020 de Javier Moreno

Enrejados puntiagudos, bancos incómodos, falta de sombra…, estas son algunas de las características de las nuevas tendencias en diseño urbano que han irrumpido en nuestras ciudades: nuevas formas de entender el espacio público de una manera mucho menos habitable. Además, los peatones encuentran cada vez más restringido su derecho a estar en la calle debido a la proliferación de espacios destinados al consumo. Paralelamente a la aparición de estas nuevas tendencias urbanas, también han aparecido ciertas narrativas estructuradas como distopías urbanas y basadas en futurismos grotescos. En este artículo analizo esta transformación de la ciudad como el desencadenante o condición de posibilidad de dos novelas españolas recientes: Sangre a borbotones de Rafael Reig y 2020 de Javier Moreno. Me centro aquí en la metamorfosis del Madrid contemporáneo, que estos dos autores toman como la raíz de un futurismo distópico de paradójica referencialidad con lo contemporáneo. A partir de este, Reig y Moreno se han dado a imaginar (o a advertir de) el posible relato futuro de nuestra sociedad.

Benches as Materialisations of (Active) Ageing in Public Space: First Steps towards a Praxeology of Space

In its promotion of “active ageing” through Age-Friendly Cities and Communities (AFCC) and the Global Network on AgeFriendly Cities and Communities (GNAFCC), the World Health Organization has developed a vision of ageing that links socio-spatial environments to personal lifestyles and community support. Approaching age-friendly environments from a “doing” perspective shifts our focus from such ideals to social practices, materialisations, and representations produced. Regularly referred to in AFCC discourse, public benches offer a great illustration for such materialisations. This article asks: what do benches tell us about the way ageing is framed and shaped in the AFCC discourse? How do benches themselves exhibit agency in it? Theoretically based on Lefebvrian social theory and critical gerontology, our reflexive article explores promotional/policy documents supporting AFCC worldwide, “good practices” shared by GNAFCC, and a series of European field observations around AFCC and benches and, finally, personal observations of ageing in public space around benches. Drawing on the Lefebvrian differentiation between representational benches, representations of benches, and social practices of benches, we show how benches can be considered as a socio-technical “assemblage” able to: 1) forge ambivalent representations and solutions for “active ageing” in public space, 2) illustrate, beyond the symbolic of space, the symbolic difficulties of “real” participative and multi-stakeholders governance promoted through “age-friendliness”, and 3) explore everyday life practices of “spatial expulsion” of “ageing in public space” for older adults. In conclusion, we suggest a major shift for the AFCC program by finding inspiration in African practices of “ageing in public space”.

Natural image deblurring based on L0-regularization and kernel shape optimization

The goal of blind image deblurring is to estimate the blur kernel and restore the sharp latent image based on an input blur image. This paper proposes a novel blind image deblurring algorithm based on L0-regularization and kernel shape optimization. Firstly, the proposed objective function of the optimization model is formulated with L0-norm terms of the gradient and intensity of kernels, which results to good sparsity and less noise in the obtained kernel. Then, the coarse-to-fine iterative framework is adopted to estimate reliable salient image structures implicitly, which can reduce computation and accelerate convergence. Finally, the kernel shape is optimized by weighting method, which enables the obtained kernel closer to the ground-truth. Experimental results on public bench mark datasets demonstrate that restored images are clear with less ring-artifacts.

Representations of Public Spaces and the Construction of Race in Yoko Tawada's “Bioskoop der Nacht”

Race is subtly present, though never actually named as such, in several of Yoko Tawada's texts as a means by which protagonists self‐identify and are identified. However, despite the prominence of dermal and racial tropes throughout her oeuvre, there has been little discussion in secondary scholarship on this ideologically provocative aspect of Tawada's work. To illustrate Tawada's highly critical engagement with, and deconstruction of, racialized identities, the following analysis focuses on the short story “Bioskoop der Nacht” through a theoretical lens informed by critical race theory, theories of racial performativity and critical whiteness studies. Specifically, I investigate how public spaces, like a public toilet and a segregated public bench, can be consequential in producing a subject's identification with a racial category, which over time sediments as a naturalized and normalized fact of nature that seemingly never required constituting in the first place.

Augmenting the bench

The concept of augmented space opens up new horizons in street furniture design, bringing to life a new, screen-enabled generation of “smart” urban objects. Their deployment, however, is not without issues – from sidewalk cluttering to identity dilution. Beyond technological obsession and nostalgic rejection, I discuss digital placemaking from the perspective of relationships. Starting from Heidegger's distinction between things and objects, and through the case of Luciole, a network of augmented public benches, the article proposes a vision of digital augmentation that, instead of focusing on information, storytelling or function, aims at triggering urban events.

Foot-in-the-Door Technique and Problematic Implicit Request for Help

A recent study ( Pascual, Guéguen, Pujos, & Felonneau, 2013 ) reported that the foot-in-the-door technique (FITD) remained effective in gaining compliance when the request was deviant in nature. However, that study used face-to-face verbal requests, which may have resulted in the participant feeling obliged to comply. In our study, a confederate was instructed to sit on a public bench where an adult male participant was sitting. In the FITD condition, the confederate asked the participant for the time. The confederate then began to read a newspaper, some term papers, or a pornographic magazine. After 2 minutes, a second confederate arrived, the first confederate stood up and left, forgetting his papers. The FITD remained effective in obtaining greater participant intervention, even in the problematic condition.

Multistability and the Agency of Mundane Artifacts: from Speed Bumps to Subway Benches

A central question in philosophical and sociological accounts of technology is how the agency of technologies should be conceived, that is, how to understand their constitutive roles in the actions performed by assemblages of humans and artifacts. To address this question, I build on the suggestion that a helpful perspective can be gained by amalgamating “actor-network theory” and “postphenomenological” accounts. The idea is that only a combined account can confront both the nuances of human experiential relationships with technology on which postphenomenology specializes, and also the chains of interactions between numerous technologies and humans that actor-network theory can address. To perform this amalgamation, however, several technical adjustments to these theories are required. The central change I develop here is to the postphenomenological notion of “multistability,” i.e., the claim that a technology can be used for multiple purposes through different contexts. I expand the postphenomenological framework through the development of a method called “variational cross-examination,” which involves critically contrasting the various stabilities of a multistable technology for the purpose of exploring how a particular stability has come to dominate. As a guiding example, I explore the case of the everyday public bench. The agency of this “mundane artifact,” as actor-network theorist Bruno Latour would call it, cannot be accounted for by either postphenomenology or actor-network theory alone.

The Foundations of Virology: Discoverers and Discoveries, Inventors and Inventions, Developers and Technologies

History of science is not a priority of most virologists. However, if given a visually engaging coffee-table book of the persons and discoveries that shaped the field of virology since Hippocrates, curious scientists will inevitably start paging through history. For this reason, every chairperson of virology departments worldwide should leave a copy of Fred Murphy’s The Foundations of Virology in the break room. Professor Murphy has a long and distinguished career in emerging viruses from the perspective of public health and academic bench science. Murphy has made his 536-page book available as a downloadable, lower-resolution, eBook on his website, which for years has also been an enormous open-access library resource for virologists. Because of numerous requests to have hard copies printed for fingertip access, Murphy has made this book available in paperback. There are clear advantages to having the hard copy in hand, in a place where it can be picked up and absorbed a little at a time. The full title of the book reflects the content; it is a chronology of images of discoverers, developers, and inventors, alongside their discoveries, developments, and inventions. The book is physically laid out in a landscape format, usually with multiple photographs on each page, featuring scientists, their institutions, spot maps from major epidemics, electron micrographs of then-emerging viruses, and graphics from landmark publications. Along the bottom of each page is printed in large font the year, names of contributors, and their historic contributions. This bottom line layout serves as an effective design enabling quick orientation to time, with the option for most entries of reading a more in-depth explanation. It also makes it easy to skip to different points in time, an efficiency advantage over Murphy’s online resources. Other books on the history of virology are a dense read (and lack all the fun pictures). Murphy’s selection of images highlights his conviction that science of viral diseases predates the concept of the specificity of disease causation and depends on initial discoveries about bacteria and bacterial diseases. Readers can thus expect to see images of Pasteur, Koch, and many others who laid the groundwork for infectious disease sciences. Although in his Foreword, Murphy disclaims that his selection of names and discoveries was “completely arbitrary,” his book leaves out few major discoveries in human and veterinary virology, from Hippocrates’ observations in 400 bce to the 2010 declaration of the global eradication of rinderpest. Particularly given the origin of new, emerging, and reemerging viral infections today, it is valuable to see pictures and stories to remind us of the exceptional crossover between human and veterinary virology. Because of the author’s longstanding involvement in virology since the 1960s, his explanations for discoveries of the past 5 decades provide a unique sense of context. This visual account of history makes obvious the sparse involvement of women in virology until the late 1900s. However, Murphy made a good effort to acknowledge women when possible. He also did a good job acknowledging seminal forces worldwide that shaped the development of virology: influential books, journals, societies, conferences, databases, even the Google search engine. Murphy’s website (www.utmb.edu/virusimages) is surely one of the most comprehensive and publically accessible virology and history of virology resources available. But having finger-tip access to this scientist’s coffee-table book is a worthwhile investment for any infectious disease specialist interested in medical history.

Practicing (In)Security in the City

On May 12–14, 2010, the graduate program in urban planning, policy and design at the American University of Beirut (AUB) organized its annual conference, City Debates, on the theme of security. Titled “Security of/in the City,” the eighth edition of City Debates included more than 25 scholars and covered over a dozen geographic contexts, mostly in the Global South. Most contributions focused on the Middle-East which is notoriously misrepresented in urban studies. They included Egypt, Palestine/Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran, but also Indonesia, Brazil, and others. Security, however, is not proper to Beirut or its region only. Writing from Beirut, security had however been a critical element of our experiences in the city. The end of the civil war in 1990 and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from South Lebanon a decade later considerably reduced the intensity of securitization. In 2005, the security deployment re-intensified with the reemergence of local and regional conflicts within a shifting geo-political global order (see Fawaz, Harb and el Gharbieh, this issue). In many cities, surveillance cameras, barbed wire, and concrete barriers have superseded benches and streetlights as the main elements of a public infrastructure. In others, the public infrastructure has itself been dubbed as the source of insecurity, as parks were closed off and public benches redesigned to secure cities from their poorest constituents (Davis 1990). Almost everywhere, security has been normalized. It has been stripped of its political significance, so that threats are taken at face value and generalized in the name of a hypothesized common good, without much recognition of their historical, geographic, and social contexts. The theme of securitization in fact originated at a particular global moment when everyday experiences were increasingly punctuated by security interruptions of variegated intensity, whether one moved within cities or travelled international borders. Echoing this reality, “security” has figured prominently in the work of urban researchers in the last decades (e.g. Graham 2004 and 2011;

A game of appearances: Public spaces and public spheres

Between the 1990s and the financial services crisis of 2008, new public spaces were regularly included in urban redevelopment schemes in the United Kingdom (and elsewhere). Following the report of the Urban Task Force, and the invention of the new category of social exclusion, new public spaces were seen as producing social cohesion. Like public art in the 1980s and 1990s, new public spaces represented a cosmetic approach to a range of deeper-rooted urban ills, but were a low-budget, highly visible alternative to dealing with problems of infrastructure and wealth distribution. This article asks what issues emerge from an investigation of new public spaces, what histories are co-opted by their advocacy, and whether public spaces have ever housed a public sphere of social self-determination. It asks whether a proto-public sphere is found in the coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and whether or not the idea of a public sphere is reflected in Millennium Place, Coventry, a new public space that is the site of a participatory art project by Jochen Gerz: The Public Bench. All this is put into focus by reference to the worldwide appearance of Occupy in 2011, which might have been an ephemeral public sphere.

Community-Initiated Urban Development: An Ecological Intervention

Neglected urban environments have been linked to social isolation, depression, and other health problems. In Portland, OR in 2003, an intervention was implemented and evaluated in three neighborhoods with the objective of promoting community participation in urban renewal and engaging residents in the construction of attractive urban places. Municipal officials approved and permitted community-designed street murals, public benches, planter boxes, information kiosks with bulletin boards, trellises for hanging gardens, all positioned in the public right-of-way. Residents within a two-block radius of the three sites were systematically sampled and interviewed before (N = 325) and after (N = 349) the intervention, of which, 265 individuals completed both surveys of the panel study. After the intervention, multivariate results revealed improvements in mental health (p = 0.03), increased sense of community (p < 0.01), and an overall expansion of social capital (p = 0.04). Through community empowerment, participation, and collective action, the strategy successfully engaged residents in restoring neighborhoods, with direct benefits to community well-being.

The Romantic and Dangerous Stranger

The Romantic and Dangerous Stranger