ABSTRACT
The New Europe app was designed to be a metaphorical passport that would evolve throughout a visitor’s path in a pop-up living lab in the multi-ethnic neighbourhood of Nørrebro in Copenhagen. The app’s interactive journey follows a path through a custom pavilion, where participants collaborate to create an alternative, fluid and dynamic statement about their collective identity and perspective on European values for the future. The New Europe app explores the potential of interactive data visualisation to emphasise the ambiguous, layered and changeable nature of identity. Further, it generates opportunities for dialogic exchange using the visualisation itself as a prompt for comparing one’s own perspectives with 85a constellation of other ones. The first room of the pop-up living lab was conceived as an immersive threshold-space through distortions of lights and projections that suggest the reflexive nature of identity. The second room introduced third party voices into the process of identity ‘rebuilding’. Here participants could listen to statements culled from current affairs or historical documentaries and related to the Europe in 12 Lessons pamphlet (European Commission 2011). The journey concludes with a sociable but also reflective space furnished with a group hammock where participants can look at the visualisation of their identity ‘fingerprint’, resulting from the interactions with all rooms in the living lab, alongside those of other living lab guests.
