The BMW Guggenheim Lab, the German automaker’s mobile laboratory that has moved across the biggest cities since 2011 to addresses the problems of urban living, is now exploring the theme of privacy in a big city through a new interactive experience “Public/Private.” The global audience is invited to measure the level of privacy they want and get in their metropolitan areas, build a visual graph based on their choices and then compare it with the results of other users.

Pic.: A screenshot from the www.bmwguggenheimlab.org/publicprivate website

The game, which takes just about 60 seconds to complete, invites users to tell how often they seek privacy in various places such as home, shopping venues, cafés, religious spaces, school and more, and also share how satisfied they are with the level of privacy in their cities. Once the data is collected, the site analyzes and unveils the results, adding them to the data earlier provided by other users from the same city. The graphs can be also compared with the ones created by users from other locations. The game, developed by NYC-based studio Collective Assembly and Tom van de Velde, aims to create a complex “privacy satisfaction” map for all the cities on the globe.

The “Public/Private” experience is based on two research projects undertaken by the BMW Guggenheim Lab in Mumbai in collaboration with a handful of Indian educational and research organizations to get a deeper insight into how city dwellers feel within the urban space. The two studies are the “Your Place, My Place, or Our Public Space?: Privacy and Spaces in Mumbai” research that includes 1,300 in-person surveys, and the complementary “Mapping Privacy in Public Spaces” project consisting of 250 “memory maps,” hand-drawn visual interpretations of Mumbai public spaces. Find highlights from the studies here.

“During the last two years, the BMW Guggenheim Lab’s programs have encouraged people to take an active role in shaping their cities, but just as important may be the ability of city dwellers to find a sense of privacy within their urban environment,” commented David van der Leer, curator of the Mumbai Lab. “The privacy studies initiated by the Mumbai Lab sparked a reimagining of how we think about and use precious public space in cities, and now, with the launch of our new interactive feature, we can open up the conversation to many other cities around the world.”