Contact

Experiential storytelling for shared spaces 

Esem Projects

large_Screen Shot 2021-05-17 at 5.19.20 pm.png

medium_Screen Shot 2021-05-17 at 5.19.20 pm.png

small_Screen Shot 2021-05-17 at 5.19.20 pm.png

thumbnail_Screen Shot 2021-05-17 at 5.19.20 pm.png

Screen Shot 2021-05-17 at 5.19.20 pm.png

favicon.ico

logo.png

large_Better Outdoors-9.jpg

medium_Better Outdoors-9.jpg

small_Better Outdoors-9.jpg

thumbnail_Better Outdoors-9.jpg

Better Outdoors-9.jpg

Published in Smart Cities News as [New Neighbourhoods, New Ways of Connecting](https://smart-cities.com.au/new-neighbourhoods-new-ways-of-communicating/#:~:text=Dr%20Sarah%20Barns%20is%20an,and%20City%20of%20Parramatta%20Council.) This article provides some of the strategic context behind our [STORYBOX](https://www.storybox.co/) platform.  

*Let’s rethink outdoor media as public space media. As Australian cities open up after COVID-19, let’s explore the potential to use outdoor media as a way to communicate important messages and provide connection within communities.*

The year 2020 has been a bumpy ride for the outdoor media sector. As cities open back up, it’s a good time to rethink the potential of digital out of home (DOOH) media to connect with communities in public spaces.  

Do you remember when outdoor billboards started to actually *move*?  First, the bus stop billboards began to rotate between advertisements – before there was one, now there were two! Then, more and more print-style billboards began to be replaced by digital screens. Suddenly, the space occupied by one asset could be sold to not just one or two buyers, but more.

A boom in advertising revenues quickly ensued. In fact, outdoor media saw a doubling of revenues between 2013 and 2019 – as the sector began to blossom into a fully-fledged digital ecosystem, known in the industry as ‘digital out of home’ (with the somewhat unfortunate acronym DOOH). 

By 2020, the sector had become a mix of hybrid digital-physical interfaces, intermediated by ‘supply side digital platforms’ (SSDPs) and ‘demand side digital platforms’ (DSDPs). Think of these digital platforms as the Ubers and Airbnbs of outdoor media, creating digital ecosystems that let buyers and sellers trade outdoor advertising space ‘programmatically’, based on granular, data-driven insights, including location, demographic data, time of day and more. 

There’s now more and more companies gearing up to play a part in this evolving digital ecosystem. Google sister company Sidewalk Labs has a stake in it via Intersection, a company on a mission to “connect digital and physical worlds” to elevate the urban experience. To put it a bit differently, Intersection uses data intelligence to more efficiently connect buyers and sellers of advertising space outdoors. 

After years of steady growth and moves toward data-driven optimisation, the Covid-19 pandemic arrived and hit the sector hard. Advertising budgets were cut, and stay at home measures saw consumer eyeballs locked onto screens indoors. Some billboards in major cities were empty – a rare sight indeed – while outdoor media companies like Ooh!Media populated their assets with advertisements about themselves. 

But as cities open up after lockdowns, there’s an opportunity for us all to rethink the role and potential of outdoor media in public spaces. Local governments are investing in ways to activate their public spaces, and bring people back into CBD spaces. The important role of public spaces as shared spaces – for creativity and inclusion – is stronger than ever.  

In this context, it’s worth considering an expanded role for our cities’ digital out of home (DOOH) infrastructure. If DOOH companies really do want to ‘elevate the urban experience’ through outdoor media, how can these services actually benefit communities in public spaces, rather than simply selling advertisements? 

Evolving the DOOH environment from one that is purely advertising-driven, to one that facilitates a mix of creativity, local content, and brands, offers the potential for an expanded ecosystem of publishers and audiences and can only mean good things for the reputation of the sector as being at the forefront of the smart city revolution.   

In Parramatta this year, the STORYBOX platform launched as a showcase for ‘public space media’ – a reimagined outdoor media offering that actively contributes to the quality and experience of a public space. 

STORYBOX introduces a partnership model between precinct partners, media and arts organisations to connect innovations in hybrid digital-physical design with an inclusive and collaborative approach to local storytelling and engagement. 

Here are some of the ways we’re rethinking the potentials of outdoor media as public space media:

**Connect with citizens, not just consumers**

As digital platforms transform the way outdoor media operates, it’s time to think more carefully about how citizens can be brought meaningfully into the equation. DOOH targets its audiences purely as consumers, using inventory to sell brands. But what if digital screen networks outdoors engaged with audiences as citizens, who are part of local communities? 

Working from home measures have seen more and more people work, shop and play locally – described by Neighbourlytics as the ‘New Local’. This provides an opportunity for DOOH companies to support more localised campaigns as well, but also to think about their outdoor assets as being a service that supports local community creativity and resilience. 

This might mean supporting more not-for-profit campaigns that facilitate community connectedness, or highlight local issues. As an example, STORYBOX invites two-way dialogue by inviting contributions from audiences in the form of ‘Tiny Stories’, short written work under 120 words that are animated for exhibition outdoors. 

**Let’s see data used for good**

Increasingly, data will be fundamental to how this industry operates. But can this data-driven revolution be engineered in ways that benefit local governments and citizens? 

Local data can be used for much more than targeted brand messaging. What about health advice, targeting local postcodes showing higher rates of obesity? Or what about using localised data to shape creative visualisations of things like heat mapping, or urban canopy? 

Clearly DOOH operators access wide audiences through their prominent public positioning. Let’s see this used to promote greater awareness about local environmental risks. 

**Innovation in business models for public benefit, not just screen resolution?**

Digital disruption means platform business models are reshaping outdoor media in fundamental ways. But as we’ve seen in the social media space, there is a need to think carefully about the ‘ecosystem’ impacts of digital platforms, particularly if platforms engineer their architectures in ways that mean profits flow disproportionately away from content creators towards platform owners. 

In the outdoor media space, the shift towards digital provides an opportunity for more public interest content to be showcased, supported perhaps by revenues from ad sales. This is essentially the model that has shaped the commercial broadcasting industry. Broadcasting regulation required commercial TV networks to reinvest ad revenues – the money made by occupying valuable broadcasting spectrum – back into local content and children’s content. 

Those regulations reflected the fact that broadcasting spectrum was essentially a ‘public good’ and therefore those who profited out of it should give back in some way to the public. That’s how Australia’s regulatory environment for television fostered a vibrant television production sector for many years. 

Now, as digital disruption reshapes outdoor media, it’s time for similar thinking to be applied to the way digital out of home networks occupy important public spaces. If we don’t do this, we’ll be left with a kind of commercial TV network occupying our cities, where the only thing on is advertisements. That’s a bit like what Shell tried to get up and running in Australia, when it toured the ‘Shellevision’ version of television in the late 1950s. 

We need to rebalance expectations of programming on outdoor digital screens, in ways that reflect the highly visible positions they occupy in public spaces.  

Ultimately, deeper engagement of the innovative potentials of outdoor media as public space media should spell better outcomes for cities, communities and creatives. Ooh! Media used their dormant inventory during lockdowns to showcase artworks during the Melbourne lockdown, showing an appetite for creative engagement one hopes will continue. 

In the months and years ahead, let’s hope there’ll be more creative collaborations like this. And let’s demand more from this exciting and quickly evolving digital ecosystem – ensuring local communities and diverse voices have a role to play in shaping the future of outdoor. ‘Elevating the urban experience’ should mean, more than ever, connecting and supporting those who are in need, leveraging the inclusivity of public spaces as spaces that enhance a sense of place and belonging. 

And while we’re thinking about new possibilities, it might be time to think up a new name for this DOOH environment. 

*Dr Sarah Barns is an urban media strategist with experience in smart city strategy, strategic design and digital placemaking. In 2020 she launched STORYBOX as a public space media platform with anchor partners the ABC and City of Parramatta Council. Sarah published her first book, Platform Urbanism: Negotiating Platform Ecosystems in Connected Cities with Palgrave in 2019 and leads digital design initiatives as Director of ESEM Projects.*

Imagining new approaches to outdoor media 

New neighbourhoods, new ways of communicating

large_03-1800x1235.jpeg

medium_03-1800x1235.jpeg

small_03-1800x1235.jpeg

thumbnail_03-1800x1235.jpeg

03-1800x1235.jpeg

*This article was originally published in Future West (Australian Urbanism) Magazine in Nov 2017, and subsequently republished in The Conversation in December 2017. [View the piece here](https://assemblepapers.com.au/2018/03/08/from-url-to-irl/)* 

Picture the scene. 

You’re on the train on your daily commute, head bowed, peering at your phone. 

A cavalcade of news stories, friends’ holiday snaps and random promoted images of trending slippers pops up on your social media feed, which you idly push along in search of something fresh. You look up. Most of the people around you are doing something similar. Connecting intensely with their smartphones, and not with anyone near them.

It’s a scene repeated across Australian cities every weekday morning. More and more of our daily lives – how we work, how we navigate, how we learn and how we entertain ourselves – take place through the interface of glowing rectangular screens. There is concern about what smartphones are doing to our attention spans, our capacity for random human interactions and our self-esteem.

But what does the age of the smartphone mean for our cities, and for how we design our public spaces?

It’s a question that has intrigued tech futurists for decades. 

Australian-born architect Bill Mitchell trained a generation of digital urbanists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to imagine and plan for the coming “city of bits”. In his 1995 book City of Bits, he likened the impact of the infobahn to that of Haussmann’s 19th-century Parisian boulevards, in their capacity to radically reshape the city.

Unlike Haussmann’s network of avenues, parks and water infrastructure, the “invisible city” of the 21st century would, Mitchell argued, be shaped more by the logic of networked data. Places would be “constructed virtually by software instead of physically from stones and timbers”.

Mitchell wasn’t the only one who believed our digital future would dramatically reshape our cities. Media futurist Marshall McLuhan speculated in 1964 that the coming “global village” would mean that “the city as a form of major dimensions must inevitably dissolve like the fading shot in a movie”. Our need for groups of people to be near to each other, he believed, would become redundant as more and more of our connections would occur virtually.

Of course, the future didn’t quite turn out that way. Vibrant, productive physical places still matter. Architects and designers are still building places of “stones and timbers”.

Smartphone-equipped citizens need not be tethered to their desks to surf the infobahn. The Internet of Things (IoT) entails more and more urban services and infrastructure being connected via tiny distributed sensors. The virtual space of the internet has become increasingly interconnected with our urban fabric.

**Experimenting with the city of data**

The city of bits has become the city of data. The millions of daily interactions and transactions in cities – volumes of energy used; movements of people, traffic, water and waste; social media interactions; emails; financial and retail transactions; and multi-modal transport flows – are generating huge volumes of “data exhaust”. These data are increasingly being put to work in an attempt to better manage the pressures and challenges our cities face.

Many hope this age of big data will lead to smarter, more responsive cities. Australian cities have begun trialling smart technologies – parking apps, smart lighting trials, public Wi-Fi – to improve basic city services. The Australian government’s A$50 million Smart Cities and Suburbs Program will help scale up these investments to allow for more ambitious trials.

Many smart-city technologies are designed to help local governments better monitor services such as waste collection and roads maintenance. For example, the Western Australian city of Joondalup is partnering with Telstra to test IoT technologies to better monitor environmental factors like temperature, humidity, pollution, light and noise levels in real time.

The recently released Smarter Planning Perth (SPP) map allows government agencies and utilities involved in infrastructure works to better collaborate, share costs and co-ordinate timetables. This is a platform designed to minimise works congestion and cut project time frames, so the city’s road networks run more efficiently.

But what kinds of places will these smart technologies and services actually create? With a focus on data analytics, efficiency and automation, there is no guarantee that the latest data-driven technologies will necessarily help our public places thrive.

As the digital urbanist Rick Robinson wrote in a 2016 article, commercial agendas for smart cities are:

> *just as likely to reduce our life expectancy and social engagement by making it easier to order high-fat, high-sugar takeaway food on our smartphones to be delivered to our couches by drones whilst we immerse ourselves in multiplayer virtual reality games.*

**Places of ‘stone and timber’ still matter**

Data-driven technologies may make cities work more efficiently, but that may not always be the only thing we want out of places. One of the great lessons of the past two decades is that, despite our growing dependence on digital platforms of communication, spaces that enable us to connect and mingle in real life still matter. Our enduring connection to places of “stones and timber” surely reflects our all-too-human desire not only for seamless interfaces and swipeable apps, but also for places of disturbance, delight, random noises and chance encounters.

As the US urbanist Jane Jacobs observed many decades ago, good places are nourished by diversity and difference, not uniformity and efficiency.

*Further reading by Sarah Barns: [ What might Jane Jacobs say about smart cities?](https://theconversation.com/what-might-jane-jacobs-say-about-smart-cities-58278#:~:text=She%20saw%20the%20modernist%20vision%20of%20cities%20as%3A&text=The%20ballet%20of%20the%20good,planning%20would%20become%20its%20orthodoxy.)*

We need, therefore, to ensure the new-found insights generated by all of our cities’ data works in the service of good places. How can this be done?

For a start, putting data to use may lead to a very analogue solution. For example, more fine-grained urban data that alerts us to temperature anomalies in different places should be used not only to monitor, but also to cool. This means more trees, not just more sensors.

Many cities have begun to design smart bus stops equipped with heat-responsive water misters and blinds, so these become places of respite and shelter for weary travellers. This approach uses digital technologies to artificially “switch on” natural services like water-cooling and shade in places that have, as a result of the use of materials like bitumen and concrete, become urban heat islands, exposing some of our most vulnerable to extremely hot conditions.

Digital technologies can also help us navigate and experience places through the events and characters that have shaped their unique identities. Digital overlays, soundscapes and augmented media can provide us with interactive experiences of the the built environments of today and their past “lives”.

Digital lighting technology allows residents of a building slated for demolition to express how they feel. Jessica Hromas, Author provided

These uses of technology allow for different, perhaps more intimate, interactions between people and places. Crucially, augmented experiences of the history of a place can help us recover what has been lost through decades of urban transformation.

Digital technologies can also be used to disrupt official narratives of place. At Sydney’s Waterloo public housing tower, slated for demolition in a new phase of urban renewal, community artists worked with public housing tenants to create a large-scale digital artwork that expresses the residents’ emotional connections to their homes.

Embedded digital technologies were used to subvert the usual mechanistic processes of community consultation managed by development agencies. The spectacular piece of digital art worked to highlight that residents should not be forgotten in the renewal process.

Clearly, the possibilities of digital technologies can be used to confound and enlarge our experiences of and connections to place.

As McLuhan and Mitchell would no doubt have realised by now, with the rise of digital technologies public spaces have become more, not less, important to the experience of cities. As we design the digital interfaces and data-driven services to support our places and spaces, the evolving possibilities of place and digital publics will no doubt continue to surprise.

*The Conversation is co-publishing articles with Future West (Australian Urbanism), produced by the University of Western Australia’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts. These articles look towards the future of urbanism, taking Perth and Western Australia as its reference point, with the latest series focusing on the public domain.*

*Image: Feeling blue: Waterloo towers resident Fiona in her apartment. Nic Walker, Author provided.* 





Article commission for Future West / Assembly Papers 

From URL to IRL: Reflections on urban digital design

[STORYBOX](https://storybox.co) is a new digital cube designed by ESEM Projects for public programs and activations. 
A 2sqm cube equipped with high resolution LED panels, STORYBOX presents curated cultural programming in partnership with selected cultural and creative organisations and precinct owners. 

Our first STORYBOX program launched in Parramatta Square in October 2020, in partnership with the ABC's Content Ideas Lab, the City of Parramatta Council, Story Factory, Curious Works and Western Sydney University.  In April 2021 we launched STORYBOX in Darling Square, with support from the City of Sydney, the ABC and a number of additional cultural and community organisations. 

**bold text**
We've created STORYBOX as a platform for inclusive media and storytelling in public spaces.

STORYBOX celebrates the diverse lives of places. We partner with a number of organisations to activate precincts, and to connect audiences with stories, insights and creative talent worth sharing.

Learn more about STORYBOX [here](https://storybox.co). 



large_STORYBOX Sydney_Key Art-2.jpg

medium_STORYBOX Sydney_Key Art-2.jpg

small_STORYBOX Sydney_Key Art-2.jpg

thumbnail_STORYBOX Sydney_Key Art-2.jpg

STORYBOX Sydney_Key Art-2.jpg

A digital cube made of solar panels designed for bespoke public programs and activations

large_Screen Shot 2021-05-01 at 8.04.39 pm.png

medium_Screen Shot 2021-05-01 at 8.04.39 pm.png

small_Screen Shot 2021-05-01 at 8.04.39 pm.png

thumbnail_Screen Shot 2021-05-01 at 8.04.39 pm.png

STORYBOX Darling Square

large_ABC_Storybox.jpg

medium_ABC_Storybox.jpg

small_ABC_Storybox.jpg

thumbnail_ABC_Storybox.jpg

ABC_Storybox.jpg

large_Storybox_Parra_TinyStory.jpg

medium_Storybox_Parra_TinyStory.jpg

small_Storybox_Parra_TinyStory.jpg

thumbnail_Storybox_Parra_TinyStory.jpg

Storybox_Parra_TinyStory.jpg

large_Storybox_SF.jpg

medium_Storybox_SF.jpg

small_Storybox_SF.jpg

thumbnail_Storybox_SF.jpg

Storybox_SF.jpg

large_Greg_simms_STORYBOX_Parra.jpg

medium_Greg_simms_STORYBOX_Parra.jpg

small_Greg_simms_STORYBOX_Parra.jpg

thumbnail_Greg_simms_STORYBOX_Parra.jpg

Greg_simms_STORYBOX_Parra.jpg

STORYBOX: Rethinking outdoor media as public space media 

STORYBOX: Rethinking outdoor media as public space media

A digital cube made of solar panels designed for bespoke public programs and activations

Keep up to date by signing up to our newsletter