SUPERPOWER! Romania
SUPERPOWER! Romania is a participatory project that explores how people make sense of their built environment during the COVID19 pandemic and the impact it has on their collective well-being through the use of digital technology. The project involves a series of virtual workshops that engages with young people and students living in Cluj-Napoca to explore self-determined issues using digital technology that capture their innate subjective perception. Participants record their subjective perception through a digital web platform designed to capture hand, touch, and fingers gestures that are commonly used on a mobile phone, and used a data dashboard to make sense of the topic.
COVID Safety
The theme collectively identified by participants was COVID safety. The workshops and data collection happened during COVID lockdown in Romania, participants were interested to explore and record their subjective perception of the surrounding campus area, e.g whether they felt unsafe/safe to use different infrastructure in public space (e.g benches), interact with strangers in different outdoor settings (e.g in a park vs a pub), or different times of the day. Each participant was given a unique web link to a custom digital web platform that enables each of them to design their own touch/hand/finger gesture that relates to different perception values that were agreed upon collectively.
Data Map
Each participant embarked on their own data collection journey where they recorded their own perception data surrounding COVID safety in different parts of the neighborhood and at different times of the day. All the data were collected in real-time and geolocation tagged. The collected data were presented on an interactive map where participants together interpreted and discussed their experiences and concerns after data collection. Through the engagement, participants collectively built a data map that is relevant to them and their community, reflecting their perception of their environment as they explored their neighborhood.
Photo Map
While recording perception data, participants are also able to use the digital web platform to take photos of their surrounding area and tagged a perception value to it. Below are a collection of photos taken by participants that relate to how they felt at different moments in time on the 2nd, 3rd, and 16th of June 2021.
Perception Notes
Participants can also choose to write down short geolocated notes and tagged a perception value to them. Below is a list of notes written by participants. Refer to the Data Map to see the notes in geolocation.
Value 1
Value 2
Value 3
Value 4
Value 5
SUPERPOWER! Romania is part of an initiative – SUPERPOWER! developed by Ling Tan that explores our personal agency and responsibility as a citizen and as an individual in our complex interactions with our cities through our subjective perception using digital tools. Through working with communities in different cities, she developed a set of toolkits consisting of wearable technology, a mobile web platform and a data dashboard that enables a community to make sense of self-determined issues and collect data about their city using their subjective perception in the form of body gestures. Past projects range from air quality, perception of safety in public space, wheelchair accessibility, female public safety, cultural diversity, children’s well-being, to womxn representation.
SUPERPOWER! Romania was developed by Ling Tan during an artistic residency hosted by Cluj Cultural Centre as part of the Art & Well-being project, funded with support from the European Commission. This website reflects the information related to the project, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
