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This paper proposes social living labs for informed learning as an innovative approach to interprofessional and community education. It presents a new conceptual model and practice framework suited to rapidly changing, information-intensive work and social environments. The proposed approach is theoretically informed and evidence based. It integrates concepts from three complementary fields: Informed learning as information literacy pedagogy that enables using information critically and creatively to learn (information science); interprofessional education as a professional learning model with a cross-disciplinary and community reach (health sciences/medicine); and social living labs as informal learning context and problem-solving process (community development). After reviewing relevant literature, the paper introduces the concepts and research that underpin social living labs for informed learning. Then it presents a new conceptual model and a practice framework to guide their design and implementation. To illustrate the practical application of this approach, a hypothetical scenario envisages health practitioners, librarians and community members collaborating in a social living lab to address health and social challenges related to child obesity. The paper concludes by discussing anticipated benefits and limitations of the approach and possible wider application. As a contribution to theory, the paper uncovers a previously unrecognised synergy between the principles of informed learning, social living labs and interprofessional education. Supporting information literacy research and practice, the paper identifies a significant role for informed learning in community and professional education, and a novel strategy for health information literacy development. The paper is of interest to educators, researchers, and practitioners across information literacy, community development, healthcare, and other professional fields.

Settlers of colour occupy a liminal space in the settler colony of Australia, and this liminality was exacerbated during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Through the literature on digital activism, technological immersion, and placemaking, this paper explores Radical Placemaking as a route for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) people based in Brisbane to stake their right to the city through alternative digitised modalities. Three projects using situated digital stories were created: (i) the Chatty Bench Project; (ii) the TransHuman Saunter Project; and (iii) Chatty Bench Festival Community Media Visual Projections. We analysed the experiences of study participants creating the digital stories and eventual user experiences of the stories for their ability to provoke self‐reflection, immersiveness, and belonging through evocation and representation of lived experiences. The paper suggests that radical placemaking offers CALD communities subversive tactics of occupying space through emerging technologies without engaging in erasure of existing histories of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine the rise of contact-tracing apps during the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic as a new form of technological solutionism – a technological or techno-social fix that can be deployed at national scale in response to an urgent, supranational problem. A dystopian view saw the rapid development and proliferation of COVID-19 contact-tracing apps as a vanguard technology for surveillance. Expediently deployed as a technological fix to the pandemic, contact-tracing was seen to threaten to transform a state of emergency into a state of exception, under which accepted or constitutional laws and norms might be suspended. Here, we extend early critiques of the contact-tracing app as a 'technofix' to argue the growing intervention of global technology corporations in digital governance and affairs of national sovereignty throughout the COVID-19 pandemic represents a new frontier of state–industrial surveillance that exploits people's pre-investment in and dependence on technology corporations. We exemplify this with the 'technofix' of the Google–Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) framework and critically examine the notion of a decentralised and privacy-preserving Bluetooth-based contact-tracing framework proposed by global technology corporations that may threaten state sovereignty when determining public health responses to current or future crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Brisbane prepares for the 2032 climate-positive Olympics, traditional industrial precincts in the city are rapidly transforming. With a population of 2.5 M Brisbane has grown by 20% every decade since 1950, and sustainability-driven urbanism is an imperative. Here we document the history and future of Holland Street in Northgate, an inner-city industrial suburb, in the context of local, state, and national urban revitalisation and policymaking. Two globally distinctive tenants, (a) the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Hub and (b) bespoke public art manufacturer and foundry Urban Art Projects, face the twin challenges of embracing green manufacturing and the re-invention of blue-collar work. Digital transformations such as an energy-efficient automated foundry and the integration of cobots in custom manufacturing are advancing the goals of green manufacturing, blue-collar upskilling, and reshoring. An open innovation network creates knowledge spillovers to other industrial precincts in the city. The article discusses local urban planning innovation that is informed by publicly and privately funded R&D, underwritten by state-level government, and a consortium of universities and industry partners. The overall goal is to sketch the nascent planning elements for a locale that is tailored to accommodate the reinvention of urban manufacturing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote work in cities is growing in popularity, fuelled by ongoing technological advances, the globalized knowledge economy, changing lifestyle preferences, the need to empower individuals, and - more recently - the effects of COVID-19. Social distancing measures introduced during the pandemic have inadvertently shown that a substantial proportion of work can be done from home or from third spaces such as co-working spaces. This paper offers a critical appraisal of the implications of this trend for neighbourhood planning and workplace design. The appraisal is in three parts. First, to set the scene, we review recent scholarship on changing work practices in the post-pandemic city. Second, we offer a summative account based on empirical data from a survey conducted by the City of Gold Coast in Australia. This survey explored the spatial distribution of remote, nomadic, and home-based workers in cities in order to discover certain socio-economic, design and built environment features that relate to this distribution. This illustrates the impact that an uptake of home-based work has for urban planning and community design. Third, we look at some of the working from home implications for career progression and productivity, as well as physical and mental health. Based on perspectives from architectural science, environmental psychology and design, this part of the paper employs human-building interaction design scholarship to argue for the design of healthy work environments - both at home and in neighbourhoods - that increase productivity, reduce sick days, and yield bett er health outcomes for the home-based workforce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to boom, and as a result, there is a major push towards integrating these technologies into cities. Walsh is optimistic suggesting that AI can in fact offer help in preserving privacy by for example, quarantining AI computation on personal devices themselves to prevent sensitive data from entering the cloud, as well as using AI-driven privacy assistants to secure and police such restrictions. To rise up to this challenge, there is an urgent need for a concerted effort to investigate urban AI as an interdisciplinary research theme (Kukka et al. [18]); that is, to scrutinize the intersections of AI, the physicality of spaces, people's lives, and the ethical and political dimensions of urban AI around the world. This workshop formed and gathered an interdisciplinary community of researchers around the topic of urban AI to discuss issues at the intersection of AI technologies and cities - i.e., urban life, spaces, places, and infrastructures - from an interdisciplinary, critical, scholarly, and design-oriented perspective. [Extracted from the article]

Real-time data from urban and rural regions is increasingly being used by policymakers to achieve environmental sustainability goals within smart cities. At the same time, smart urban governance has been criticized for its technocratic and human-centric approach that sacrifices long-term planning for the here-and-now and overlooks the more-than-human in sustainability-related city-region foresight strategies. By reviewing two city-region foresight strategies employed in Australia – namely, the Atlas of Living Australia and Greenprints – this paper argues for the merits of including foresight strategies that account for multispecies entanglements. The paper mobilizes more-than-human perspectives to propose multispecies foresight for better urban and regional sustainability outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtual world platforms such as "Second Life" have been successfully used in educational contexts to motivate and engage learners. This article reports on an exploratory workshop involving a group of high school students using "Second Life" for an urban planning project. Young people are traditionally an under-represented demographic when it comes to participating in urban planning and decision-making processes. The research team developed activities that combined technology with a constructivist approach to learning. Real-world experiences and purposes ensured that the workshop enabled students to see the relevance of their learning. Our design also ensured that play remained an important part of the learning. By conceiving of the workshop as a "serious playground", we investigated the ludic potential of learning in a virtual world. (Contains 1 table and 8 figures.)

The Brisbane Media Map is both an online resource and a tertiary-level authentic learning project. The Brisbane Media Map is an online database which provides a detailed overview of about 600 media industry organizations in Brisbane, Australia. In addition to providing contact details and synopses for each organization's profile, the Brisbane Media Map also includes supplementary information on current issues, trends, and individuals in the media and communication industry sectors. This resource is produced and updated annually by final-year undergraduate Media and Communication students. This article introduces the Brisbane Media Map, its functionality and systems design approach, as well as its alignment with key learning infrastructures. It examines authentic learning as the pedagogical framework underpinning the ongoing development work of the resource and highlights some synergies of this framework with participatory design principles. The Brisbane Media Map is a useful example of an authentic learning approach that successfully engages students of non-traditional and non-design areas of study in human-computer interaction, usability, and participatory design activities.

The rapid growth of home-based work raises questions about its long-term impacts on neighbourhoods and cities. By removing the need to commute, home-based work has the potential to advance the New Urbanism aspirations of walkable neighbourhoods in an urban village format where people live, work and play. Nonetheless, the uneven distribution of this emerging work practice, strongly associated with the socio-economic status of neighbourhoods, is exacerbating the risk of increased urban inequalities. This paper presents pre- and post-COVID data for the City of Gold Coast, Australia, and it discusses the urban distribution of home-based work by analysing the home-based workers' locational preferences, their daily movement patterns, the preferred built environment outcomes, and the urban design features. The findings suggest that certain social and economic interactions tend to increase with the growth of remote work. These interactions, magnified by the COVID pandemic, offer opportunities to advance the New Urbanism aspirations of cohesive, walkable communities and neighbourhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As global agricultural production methods and supply chains have become more digitised, farmers around the world are adopting digital agricultural technologies (AgTech) such as drones, IoT, remote sensors, blockchain and satellite imagery to inform on-farm decision-making. Yet, on the backdrop of a persistent digital divide between rural and urban communities, many Australian farmers are not taking up digital AgTech. It has been argued that these farmers are being 'left behind' in an increasingly digital world, and this may impact their future success. Scholars of digital AgTech adoption typically take a siloed approach, positioning the individual or farm as the key unit of analysis, with fewer studies addressing structural conditions. This has provided a useful but incomplete understanding of the disparity between users and non-users. This paper builds upon emerging sociocultural approaches, which aim to address this gap, by using a novel 'communitive ecology' analytical approach to consider how adoption occurs through networks of actors. Based on an exploratory, qualitative study of a digital farming project on a cotton farm and its digital communicative ecology in South-East Queensland, Australia this study identifies technological, discursive, and social factors of digital AgTech adoption. Overall, an evolution from a digital divide to data divide, expressed in the interactions between farmers and stakeholders, and characterised by gaps between the generation and application of farm data, is observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Big data analytics in smart cities has given rise to the new interdisciplinary field of urban science, which uses data mining, visual analytics, modeling, and simulation to create novel planning support systems. One such system is RAISE (the Rapid Analytics Interactive Scenario Explorer) which assists urban planners and local government authorities with rapid analysis and visualization of land value uplift from proposed transport infrastructure. This paper's contribution is twofold. We first introduce co-design as a method for developing a planning support tool such as RAISE and present findings from a series of co-design workshops that informed its development. Findings included the need for further transparency of the land valuation process and recommendation of a community feature that explains valuation outcomes to landowners. The resulting insights from the co-design process led to a series of emerging questions that the design of this type of planning support system raises: (a) the collaboration with local government partners and the need for what Huybrechts calls "institutioning;" (b) some of the ethical implications of use, and (c) the impact of moving from conventional to AI/machine learning-assisted modeling. We discuss these questions as part of our second contribution. The paper concludes by reflecting on the process of using the development of RAISE not just as a solution but as an opportunity to problematize new questions and identify future research opportunities that tackle these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on creative-industries clusters emphasizes both community and network dynamics in cross-organizational linkages and their role in fostering group and individual creativity and innovation. This article turns to an economic sociology framework, examining what is at stake in these collaborations and their embeddedness in broader social relationships. The authors report on a qualitative study of the linking and networking practices and rationales of the design sector collocated in an inner-city area in Brisbane, Australia. The study suggests that not only was the locale important in both community- and network-level relationships but also that these should be understood in relation to symbolic representation in the field of design. The article argues that the innovative potential of interorganizational linkages should be understood in terms of layers of symbolic identifications at the level of the field of design, the symbolic community associated with the locale, and the 'awareness space' of networks. Keywords: creative industries; clusters; symbolic relationships; embeddedness

Australia's cities and regions are the envy of the world for their natural beauty and lifestyle amenities and attractions. Not only has this sustained the tree-change and sea-change movement, with broadband connectivity and the COVID-19 pandemic so-called 'e-changers' and 'flee-changers' are part of the populus seeking to combine career aspirations with lifestyle destinations. This paper discusses the growing popularity of remote, particularly home-based work, and planning and design responses that accommodate this type of work in residential neighbourhoods. The issues are exemplified through a case study of the City of Gold Coast drawing on mixed methods including survey instruments and a design charrette facilitated by the authors. The design charrette is reported via three integrative narratives of a remote worker, the neighbourhood and the city. Findings outline preferences of remote workers towards built environment and urban design features enabling collaboration and knowledge exchange and assist in a better understanding of the socio-economic factors behind the spatial distribution of home-based work. The study's findings offer a range of implications for appropriate urban planning and design responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Only recently have scholars of criminology begun to examine a wider spectrum of the effects of digital technologies beyond ‘cybercrime’ to include human rights, privacy, data extractivism and surveillance. Such accounts, however, remain anthropocentric and capitalocentric. They do not fully consider the environmental impacts caused by the manufacture, consumption, use and disposal of digital technologies under conditions of ecologically unequal exchange. The worst impacts of extractivism and pollution are borne by societies and ecosystems in the world’s economic periphery and contribute to an acceleration of planetary ecocide. Three examples illustrate our argument: (1) deep-sea mining of metals and minerals; (2) the planned obsolescence of digital devices while limiting the right to repair; and (3) the disposal of e-waste. Acknowledging the urgent need to reorient the trajectory of technology innovation towards more-than-human futures, we advance some ideas from the field of design research—that is, the field of scholarly inquiry into design practices—on how to decouple technological progress from neoliberal economic growth. We venture outside criminology and offer a glimpse into how design researchers have recently begun a similar reflective engagement with post-anthropocentric critiques, which can inspire new directions for research across digital and green criminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]