A research about Digital social networks influence in Urban spaces, Case study – Stortorget, Lilla torg & Gustav Adolfs torg in Malmö, Sweden

Sammanfattning: This paper sets out the role of social media that can influence the people to stay connected via social networking for meeting up in public spaces. People increasingly use gadgets like laptop and mobile to stay connected for virtual interaction in outdoors. It generates a strong connection and creates more opportunity to socialize and share knowledge with rest of the world. This research paper aims to find the implication of digital social networking for new ways to use public space. Public spaces in Malmö are chosen for the study such as Stortorget, Lilla torg and Gustav Adolfs torg. These public spaces are been in public attention from hundreds of years and were serving for various generations of public life. It is very interesting to study about digital social networking and how these modern forms of connecting can influence the social interaction in well established and centrally located public spaces. The study on this topic focuses about solving the problems such as the improving the Visual Qualities, dead spaces, lack of defined outdoor seating and noise level. Objective of this research is to find design principles that support the use of social media in public space. The theoretical background concerns how Digital social networking influences daily life, understanding about urban social interaction in the real and virtual world. The author has adopted methods such as questionnaire, online question form and Observations. Such collections of data are required to get various opinions from public. This will enrich the understanding on how mobile information techniques will set new requirements for furnishing public spaces. This data is analyzed to yield design strategies for improvement of the existing problems. Data collected from the implemented methods show that people are encouraging the idea of virtual interaction in these public spaces. As a result, design proposals are made for each square that aim to satisfy the needs of users of the modern generation and seeks to influence the people flow by virtual social media. Thereby virtual interaction will be able to initiate meetings in real life creating livelier city center. The scope of this research is to find a design principle that can be adopted in design of public space for the contemporary users with the new concepts of social life.