How can knowledge be reconfigured so as to enhance experience, enable participation, and augment environments? "Shaping Knowledge" argues that knowledge is a product of human activity in a social space, and as a result is a formative resource. The book takes a step beyond information visualisation and imagines a learning environment in which knowledge can be manipulated as an object. Practical examples from the domains of health, education, travel, museums and libraries are offered, and chapters cover knowledge and space, unpredictability and authorship, as well as agility, ubiquity and mobility.
Applies high-level theory work to an engineering domainProposes a novel approach to spatial, urban and interaction designBrings a rare inter-disciplinary perspective to a convergent technology"

This book offers state-of-the-art 'tools for thinking' for urban designers, planners and decision-makers. Thematically it focuses on the contexts of problems in urban design and places community spaces at the heart of urban design research. The book provides practicable tools for network modelling and visualization in urban design research. Step-by-step examples take readers through methods for tracing the evolution of road networks, and their impacts on contemporary community spaces. Easy-to-follow guides to programming show how to process and plot community data sets as network graphs. They reveal how these can help to observe and represent the different ways in which community spaces are inter-connected. This book places these technological methods in the context of current theories of community formations. It considers how these cutting-edge tools for thinking in urban design research - comprising both theories and methods - could transform our understanding of community spaces as being complex, inter-dependent and socially meaningful assets. This book is pioneering in its analysis of the urban contexts to community formations, and in its argument for professional integration between urban and knowledge practitioners. Academics and professionals within the fields of design research, urban studies, spatial analysis, urban geography and sociology will benefit from reading this book.