Mediated Urban Landscape: reflecting the impacts, challenges and outcomes of the participants in CyberParks’s Training School

Considering the frame of interaction between urban space and digital technologies, CyberParks Project organized a Training School in order to reflect and generate new outputs about the topic. Coordinated by Prof. Konstantinos Ioannidis, the Training School « Enhancements : Mediated Digital Landscape » took place during four days (from the 29th March to the 1st April 2016) in the greek city of Thessaloniki. In the context of a Short-Term Scientific Mission (STSM), I participated as an anthropologist to assume an external outlook and evaluate the impacts and success of the school.
The Training School shift from the classical hierarchical relationship to a participatory process of learning, empowering 31 participants coming from 16 different European countries in this extra scholar formation and looking to build a new network of makers in the urban contemporary field.
Following this pedagogical approach, the « Action Learning » program consists on 9 workshops driven by 15 tutors representing a wide scale of European countries, schools, field works, approaches and areas of research. Attending to one workshop per half-day, the participants were invited to work in teams, starting from a concept or a case study introduced by the tutor and lead to produce a common project, ending with a public presentation.
Divided in four modules, the full program was composed by the following topics: « Transforming Value », « Spatial and Digital Methods », « The Aesthetics of Mediated Experiences and Social Life in Mediated Environments » and focused on a main case study : the Gardens of the Waterfront of Thessaloniki.
As an anthropologist, I followed the whole process of the Training School using different methods to complete the evaluation. I first started with a pre-poll to collect the expectation of the participants. During the development of the Training School, I observed and participated the workshops and I subsequently realized informal interviews with the participants and the tutors to size the challenges and evaluate the results. Finally, I conceived a second post-poll and sent the participants after the Training School to collect their feed-back and analyse the highlights and impacts of the Training School within their personal trajectories.