PROJECT SUMMARY

LiDAR sensing concept

Automation and Public Space

Focus Areas: News and Media, Transport and Mobility, Health, and Social Services
Research Program: Data
Status:
 Active

From delivery drones to digital twins to crowd surveillance, automated decision-making technologies and practices are increasingly impacting public and shared space. This project investigates how automated decision-making systems impact public and shared space via sensors that produce actionable digital simulations, artefacts, and interfaces. Through a mixed methods approach, it will examine current and potential effects of automated decision-making on the form, use, and experience of public space.

Technological development in this area is undergoing rapid change. Delivery via autonomous drone requires sensor-driven navigation systems, but the data and models they produce about public space will likely lead to modulations of that space in response. In urban and environmental governance, ‘digital twins’ are increasingly to monitor environments in real-time, simulate the impact of potential changes, and even implement those changes directly. Technologies such as these are not only increasingly deployed in Australia, but are also invented, designed, and tested here too, often in proximity to defence and defence industries.

Understanding how tools of automated spatiality reconfigure environments and the role of policy and industry in their innovation and uptake will generate new knowledge about a critical point of convergence between public space, technology, defence, and industry with national significance, as well as implications for international jurisdictions facing similar changes and challenges.

Over 3 years commencing in 2022, the project aims to answer the following questions:
• How is space-making automated across different technologies and contexts? What logics, techniques and practices are shared? What are distinct to different contexts?
• How does automated spatiality lead to the reconfiguring of public space?
• How are digital infrastructures, such as unmanned traffic management systems for civilian airspace, imagined, organised, and regulated?
• How do policy settings, industrial demands, and defence priorities shape the development and application of technologies of automated spatiality?

PUBLICATIONS

Andrejevic, M.

Journal article

Biometric Re-bordering: Environmental Control During Pandemic Times, 2022

Andrejevic, M., Volcic, Z.

Journal article

Seeing Like a Border, 2021

Andrejevic, M., Volcic, Z.

Journal article

RESEARCHERS

Michael Richardson

Assoc Prof Michael Richardson

Lead Investigator,
UNSW

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Mark Andrejevic

Prof Mark Andrejevic

Chief Investigator,
Monash University

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Jake Goldenfein

Dr Jake Goldenfein

Chief Investigator,
University of Melbourne

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ADM+S Chief Investigator Anthony McCosker

Prof Anthony McCosker

Chief Investigator,
Swinburne University

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Jathan Sadowski

Dr Jathan Sadowski

Associate Investigator,
Monash University

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Rowan Wilken

Assoc Prof Rowan Wilken

Associate Investigator,
RMIT University

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Kelly Lewis

Dr Kelly Lewis

Research Fellow,
Monash University

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Thao Phan

Dr Thao Phan

Research Fellow,
Monash University

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Zoe Horn

Zoe Horn

Student,
Western Sydney University

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Lauren Kelly

Lauren Kelly

Student,
RMIT University

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Andrew Brooks

Dr Andrew Brooks

Affiliate,
UNSW

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Danielle Hynes

Danielle Hynes

Affiliate,
UNSW

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Christopher O'Neill

Dr Chris O’Neill

Affiliate,
Deakin University

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PARTNERS

OVIC Logo

Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner

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