Place Pulse
In 1960, Kevin Lynch published “The Image of the City” and established how people perceive and create mental models of the cities they inhabit. Since then, the fields of both architecture and urban planning have heavily studied urban perception, placing emphasis on everything from the macro scale of a city to the intricate details of an individual building. Institutional limitations, however, have limited the throughput of urban perception studies by constraining the quantity of both images and subjects used.
To mitigate these past limitations, we present Place Pulse. Place Pulse is a website that allows anybody to quickly run a perception study and visualize the results in powerful ways. Developed at the MIT Media Lab by the Macro Connections group, Place Pulse crowdsources surveys to internet participants, asking binary perception questions across a large number of geotagged images. From the responses of each participant, directed graphs are generated, which are then layered with the graphs of others, forming what we call a perception network. This perception network can be analyzed and visualized in a multitude of ways, allowing the experimenter to identify interesting patterns in the data, possibly forming the basis for a future hypothesis.
Place Pulse | The Collaborative Image of the City.
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