Face your world
www.faceyourworld.nl/slotervaart
Face Your World (FYW) is a project which enables children
and youths to design their urban neighbourhood in 3D by means of digital
software. At several national and international locations artist Jeanne van
Heeswijk already won quite a reputation for herself with this project. Up till
now a big organization was necessary to execute the project, with lots of
personnel and a physical location because the tool wasn’t internet based.
That’s why the tool could only be put into action for big
urban projects with sufficient budgets to give residents a voice. Also, the
current FYW-tool doesn’t allow interaction. Children and other people involved
cannot react on each other’s work. There is no possibility to store images and
reproduce them elsewhere. With the help of Digitale Pioniers the so-called web
interactor has been developed. This is an internet based location where children
can upload material and discuss about it. This can be (flat) images they made
with the FYW-tool, or images they made with their teacher at school, or at home
on the computer, or just with pen and paper. In this way the FYW approach can be
put into action on a much larger scale and with less thresholds. One should
think about a school that wants to redesign the school yard, neighbours who want
to start a common garden, or a neighbourhood that is going to be redesigned, but
without a sufficient budget to guide it intensively. With the web interactor
children can show how their perfect neighbourhood looks like and consequently
discuss it with other children and the planners of the project.
Final products
At first one wanted to use Mambo of Mmbase for the CMS, but
eventually one chose to make a new CMS made to measure. It is developed by HvU? students.
The software needed to store the images made with the FYW-tool, has been made
available by the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (KIT) (“Royal Institute for
the Tropics”), in exchange for parts of their software. This ‘portfolio’ tool is
provided with an own skin and is integrated in the site. The website also offers
streaming video and an audio-visual forum. Plain manuals have been developed to
work with the web interactor. The software of the FYW-tool and the web
interactor is placed under the authority of the Face Your World foundation.
Impact
Originally Face Your World is an art project and it will
partly remain so. With the help of Digitale Pioniers one moved to a freely available application with a
broad scope. In several other cities people are seriously interested to use the
project in urban redesigns (Eindhoven, Oss and Groningen). The cooperation with
KIT also bears fruit; later this year the FYW-tool and the web interactor are
going to be used in an exchange project with Iranian children.
This project was executed between December 2004 and June
2005.
Contact
Stichting Face Your World
Frank Alsema
www.faceyourworld.nl/slotervaart
