Digitizing Lived Experience: Well-Being and Equity Promotion in the Everyday City

Understanding human behavior and wellbeing dynamics in the city is foundational for developing human-centered urban design and planning solutions. In this lecture, Dr. Fan will introduce her app-based day-reconstruction technology, which captures people’s daily activities, trips, and emotional well-being in-the-moment as they move in the city. She will further illustrate how the technology has been used to generate data and insights on fostering happier and more inclusive cities. Examples include mapping happiness ratings to streets and roads and uncovering the gender gap in everyday well-being.

Yingling Fan is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Her work puts human well-being and people’s lived experience at the center of designing urban infrastructure and technology solutions. Her human-centered research has not only helped urban planners create healthier and more equitable cities but also led to patented and commercialized digital systems to measure and visualize the spatiotemporal patterns of human activities and wellbeing. Her collaborative scholarship has attracted more than 20 million U.S. dollars in research grants.