Augmented Public Transit: Integrating Approaches to Interface Design for a Digitally Augmented City

The contemporary body is a connected body that can instantly access home, work, leisure, and information via rapid mobility and communication networks, a “tethered” body as Sherry Turkle would put it. The ever-intrusive reach of technology into our social and physical environments and our bodies has given birth to the idea of the cybernetic organism (cyborg) or post-human (Hayles, 1999). In the discipline of Architecture the cyborg has provoked wild speculation and disembodied fantasies, yet little attention has been given to the micro realities of digital interfaces and to the discipline of user centric design, or to the empirical study of vast interactive information systems already in place across the urban environment. This paper will argue that integrated approaches between architecture, interaction design and other disciplines are key to meaningful interventions within an augmented urban environment. This argument will be illustrated by a recent interface design project dealing with usability and public transit, conducted at the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto.