A growing body of research is looking at ways to bring the processes and benefits of online deliberation to the places they are about and in turn allow a larger, targeted proportion of the urban public to have a voice, be heard, and engage in questions of city planning and design. Seeking to take advantage of the civic opportunities of situated engagement through public screens and mobile devices, our research informed a public urban screen content application DIS that we deployed and evaluated in a wide range of real world public and urban environments. For example, it is currently running on the renowned urban screen at Federation Square in Melbourne. We analysed the data from these user studies within a conceptual framework that positions situated engagement across three key parameters: people, content, and location. We propose a way to identify the sweet spot within the nexus of these parameters to help deploy and run interactive systems to maximise the quality of the situated engagement for civic and related deliberation purposes.

The increasing ubiquity of digital technology, internet services and social media in our everyday lives allows for a seamless transitioning between the visible and the invisible infrastructure of cities: road systems, building complexes, information and communication technology, and people networks create a buzzing environment that is alive and exciting. Driven by curiosity, initiative and interdisciplinary exchange, the Urban Informatics Research Lab at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia, is an emerging cluster of people interested in research and development at the intersection of people, place and technology with a focus on cities, locative media and mobile technology. This paper seeks to define, for the first time, what we mean by 'urban informatics' and outline its significance as a field of study today. It describes the relevant background and trends in each of the areas of people, place and technology, and highlights the relevance of urban informatics to the concerns and evolving challenges of CSCW. We then position our work in academia juxtaposed with related research concentrations and labels, followed by a discussion of disciplinary influences. The paper concludes with an exposé of the three current research themes of the lab around augmented urban spaces, urban narratives, and environmental sustainability in order to illustrate specific cases and methods, and to draw out distinctions that our affiliation with the Creative Industries Faculty affords.

Federated identity management systems synthesise complex and fragmented user information into a single entity. Literature from the provider's perspective notes this integration extends many benefits to the end user and the privileges provided by digital identity authentication schemes have been well documented from this perspective. Less explored are the perceptions of federation from the user's perspective. This study reports an empirical user study that examines the relationship between identity and technology using contextual interviews, focus groups and cultural probes. It emerges that while current federated systems satisfy user needs by allowing the construction of multiple digital data sets that are moored to a central identifier, they fail to provide the user with control over the capability to act in the ‘hatch’, ‘match’ and ‘dispatch’ phases of the digital identity lifecycle. Ultimately, this reduces the user's trust in providers and results in reluctance to disclose personal details.

When exploring a topic as intangible as the construction of mobile social networks it is necessary to look at how relationships are formed and at the way users identify themselves through their interactions. The theoretically informed discourses within cultural theory make an ideal lens for understanding these subtle nuances of use in terms of design. This paper describes a case study where the application of abstract cultural theory concepts to the practical act of analysing qualitative data from a user study resulted in the development of The Swarm mobile phone prototypes. By signposting the intersection of cultural theory within HCI, the value of a philosophically grounded mobile phone design space is highlighted. To uncover reactions to the design we explored the blogs that sprung up critiquing an online version of The Swarm and in doing so, discovered the at times subversive values (such as the need to lie) that users place on their mobile mediated interactions.