Urban Tech Lab – new technologies for exploring urban everyday life

It is generally acknowledged that designing buildings and places incorporating digital transformations and sustainable environmental endeavors will rely on participative approaches. However, in practice the actual involvement of future users in urban planning and design activities and post occupancy evaluations of new buildings, urban spaces and technologies are not always systematically carried through. Thus, there may be a large gap between planning, design and architectural visions and actual everyday urban living. Through our interdisciplinary activities in our newly established Urban Tech Lab at Roskilde University, we aim to develop technology-based methods to qualify human experiences of urban places. The goal is to create methodological insights for the interested communities and competences for ourselves, coworkers and our students on the sensory, physical and emotional influences of the built environment. Furthermore, we wish to contribute to discussions of what we think is the somewhat undifferentiated and relatively non-critical approaches to the application of biometric methods in the design of urban cities. In doings so, we gain experience in combing humanities and social science participative qualitative methodologies such as fieldwork and interview techniques with a quantitative approach applying biometric technologies such as wearable mobile eye tracking equipment, galvanic skin response, electrocardiography and virtual reality.