Fifteenth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge & Society

Abstract

Designers and urban planners, tasked with envisioning and building cities, use visualizations to depict and communicate the urban environments that we will live in tomorrow. From simple sketches and photographs to online reality, practitioners deploy visual tools to render the future, helping publics to see, know, and anticipate who and what may be included. What risks, rewards, and trade-offs can we tie to particular visualization instruments used to depict urban futures? How does our knowledge of the future shift when visual technologies vary in fidelity and realism? Drawing on discourse analysis, expert-interviews, and case-study research with practicing architects and urban planners, this paper explores how visualization devices are deployed in the urban development process to communicate knowledge about the future and affect community decision-making. Focus is placed on how visualization devices, both new and emerging, are used to mediate the future of cities and help to generate different forms of certainty and uncertainty, imagination, persuasion, risk, and agency. This paper contributes to Science Technology Studies (STS) discourse on anticipatory knowledge production by drawing novel perspectives from Human Computer Interaction and Design Studies to critically examine emerging connections between knowledge, visual media, and society.