Neighborhood Networks is a long-term research project that combines community arts, participatory design, informal learning, and engineering to articulate and discover how communities use emerging technologies, specifically robotics. Through interviews, participant observation, generative workshops, and participatory design, the Neighborhood Networks project focuses on working with neighborhood groups that are organized for local representation and collective action. Our interest is how these neighborhood groups use or might use emerging technologies as a means to publicly address their concerns.
The Neighborhood Networks project is directed by Carl DiSalvo at The Georgia Institute of Technology and Illah Nourbakhsh at Carnegie Mellon University.
The University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out of School Environments (UPCLOSE) is partner in the Neighborhood Networks program, providing guidance and support in the community outreach, program development, and evaluation. The project is funded by a generous grant from Intel Research.
