

| Shanfan Huang Industrial and Strategic Design 1984, China Cityard: What People Really Think of a City? Cities witnessed it: More and more residents act like tourists, seeking for amusement; more and more tourists act like local residents, enjoying a lazy afternoon. When urbanism and neo-tourism became a hot topic, a web concept design, Cityard was launched. The project offers a novel way to represent world cities on the internet. It helps the users to find out cities by their emotion. Today cities world widely compete to attract top talents’ attention. Researchers aspire to rank cities: by demography, environment, education, industry and so on. Whose Top10 List shall we listen to? The Cityard project suggests, forget about numbers – when it comes to the decision of where to live, it is the charisma of the city that matters.
Instead of putting cities on geographical maps, Cityard connects cities based on their semantic relevance. Mining into online buzz, Cityard abstracts word clouds, and some of the words are transformed into symbols, so to make a visual representation. Since all the data is sourced from the web and updates frequently, the user might find unexpected pattern of the world cities. Moreover, registered user can reshape the patterns by commenting, tagging and rebuilding the semantic pattern of cities. With words added to the city vocabulary, the semantic patterns constantly change, and keep refreshed.
Contact: +358 44588 5017 shanfan.huang(at)gmail.com http://mlab.taik.fi/cityard
| DESIGN | Aaltio, Lauri Ahonen, Hanna Austin, Timothy Auttila, Pieta-Linda Chernyakevich, Bogdan Falin, Priska Göbel, Christian Heinonmäki, Mari Hsiao, Lien-Chiu Huang, Shanfan Ikonen, Janne Kaapo, Kaisa Kristiina Kangasniemi, Salla Korhonen, Eerika Koski, Salla Kuusinen, Marjo Lee, Bang Jeon Lepokorpi, Saara Liukko, Anu Mansén-Laalo, Marjo Mensio, Ville Osborne, Devon Panasupon, Kompit Park, Hyunsun Piispanen, Tatu Puoskari, Maija Raivio, Päivi Riski, Liisa Salokannen, Satu Savolainen, Tea Sistonen, Tia Takagi, Yuko Takkinen, Jussi Tikka, Suvi Urh, Vasja Vainiomäki, Katri Volcoff, William Väänänen, Sanna |