Imaginario: Web Tools for a Social Imaginary Definition
By Urbanohumano
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Imaginario is a programme that uses a dynamic system to synthesise the collective imaginary of a community. Its greatest interest lies in the ability to gather and summarise all of the information contributed by each user and produce an intuitive graphic visualisation of the latter.
The set of words and assessments contributed by the users define a synthetic and collective view of a particular issue, which may be considered to be the collective imaginary of a community to which the users belong.
he corresponding graphic representation highlights the arguments that the participants have most often exposed. Each word is represented within in a square whose size is proportionate to the number of times it has been used and with a colour that defines its negative or positive character, following an established colour scale. All of the words will form a cloud of squares of different sizes. By moving the mouse cursor over the words, it will be possible to find out its assessment and its relation to the other words. When the cursor is placed on top of a word (square), all the words that are related to it are arranged around it, with their corresponding assessment (colour).
his project was born in a doctorate in Urban Planning and its first objective is to develop a tool that may be useful in citizen participation processes. For these projects to be really interesting, it is necessary for citizens to reflect on their own cities, on the parameters that define them and on the activities and lives that they hold. This web tool is intended in a very simple way to motivate this type of reflections and allow to share them among citizen-users. For this reason, despite having started out from the perspective of urban planning, the scope of Imaginario can be projected towards multidisciplinary fields.