Designing through Simulation: Integration of Ubiquitous Street Facilities into the Urban Media Fabric Dongyoun Shin a , Sung Ah Kim b a Design Media and Technology Lab, Sungkyunkwan University b Dept. Of Architecture, Sungkyunkwan University dongyoun79@gmail.com , sakim@skku.edu Abstract This study starts from a critical thinking that the meaning of Urban Media may or should be redefined in order for the research in Urban Media Fabric Simulator to situate itself within the realm of new media solution. Defining Ubiquitous Street Light (USL) as the most suitable infra structure, among the various street furniture for designing urban media, Urban Media Fabric Simulator plays a central role to embody the Urban Media. The research was conducted by collecting and storing a large number of urban information in real-time and standardizing the gathered data to establish the urban data network. Based on the information pattern extracted from the urban data, we implemented emotional methods to guide efficient activity through the urban communication, and presented a simulator, Urban Media Fabric Simulator, data mining and visualization framework, which support the urban media management. 1. Introduction Advances in IT technology have contributed to the design trend of urban architecture: The Surface of urban built environment is becoming an unprecedented information device. By combining street furniture harnessed with sensors and information display devices with the ubiquitous information network, it became possible to transform the urban space into a huge media fabric. This study starts from a critical thinking that the meaning of urban surface should be redefined in order to situate itself within the realm of new urban media solution [1]. 1.1. Possibility for Urban Surface for Urban Media In this research, we treat the Ubiquitous Street Light (USL) unit as a kind of pixel of urban media fabric. Thus, the fabric should generate information in mega scale, or instantly transform an urban district into a media surface. This paper presents the idea of the urban media fabric: a group of ubiquitous streetlights controlled by an interactive urban media simulator. We have been developing the simulator as a part of Ubiquitous StreetLight (USL) research & development project. Each USL unit is an assembly of ITC (Information Telecommunication and Computer) components such as sensors, displays, lighting devices, and controllers at its own in the USL research project. 2. Urban Media In order to define the core elements of urban media, we first investigated a current trend of information media employing innovative and effective technologies. These days, one of the noticeable keywords of media technology seems to be ‘mobile’: We cannot only communicate with others but also produce and consume diverse information ‘anytime, anywhere’ on worldwide network. The content of the information, however, usually focuses on the information customization for private users [2]. Mobile device do not serve an appropriate media to deliver the information for public benefit. The role of urban media, contrary to the personal mobile media, seems to reside in the concept of public information. Therefore, there have been diverse attempts to utilize an urban media solution to convey urban information in spite of not demand each citizen, habitats in urban area. The existing facilities for urban media tend to realize with bigger size and numerous devices with their personal media. These physical factors obviously have a limitation covering the whole Fourth International Conference on Networked Computing and Advanced Information Management 978-0-7695-3322-3/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/NCM.2008.177 311