Nashin Mahtani
CogniCity
since 2003
Data and Operations Diagram + Conference
@ Lisboa Cidade Aberta Exhibition
Video, 23′34″ (2016)
@ Online
CogniCity is a free and open source software developed to crowd source and visualize urban data. It helps to gather, verify, sort, and visualize data from a variety of localized communication networks into integrated, light-weight platforms relating these data spatially. This enterprise-level platform transforms vast volumes of data into actionable information for urban publics and government agency decision-makers.
CogniCity OSS was initially designed, tested, and deployed through an operational platform, PetaJakarta.org (Map Jakarta), during a three-year (2013-2016) applied research project. Following the success of this pilot study, the software was further developed to run PetaBencana.id (Disaster Map Indonesia), a free, web-based platform that produces megacity-scale visualizations of disasters using both crowd-sourced reporting and government agency validations in real-time. In the context of the PetaBencana.id platform, CogniCity OSS integrates the management of social media and API-sourced data in order to make hazard information open, accessible, and actionable for residents, government agencies, NGOs, and secondary private sector developers. PetaBencana.id has been used by millions of resident-users, informing their time-critical decisions on safety and navigation in response to the flood in real-time and has also been adopted by the National Emergency Management Agency (BNPB) to monitor flood events, improve response times, and share time-critical emergency information with residents.
The video, “CogniCity: Software as Infrastructure for Climate Adaptation”, and the Data and Operations Diagram, visualize the complex systems of software architecture in order to render perceptible, and thereby comprehensible, the informational and organizational flows that are rarely seen or understood by users; thus, in order to help platform users understand both the value and importance of this system, the objective of these data visualizations are to take users “behind the interface” to understand the socio-technical components involved in the civic co-management of disasters.
BIO
Nashin (Indonesia) is the Project Co-Manager and Lead Designer of PetaBencana.id, an Indonesian disaster mapping foundation, where she creates data visualization strategies and new representational forms to explain humanitarian information technologies and systems. With a background in architecture, her work develops representational strategies and critical communication practices to address multi-disciplinary challenges. Her current research examines relations among urban infrastructure, computation, and neuroscience.
Nashin Mahtani is also the Research Coordinator of anexact office in Jakarta, Indonesia, where she leads the office’s exhibition-led inquiry The Architecture of the Brain.
