The second edition of the Human Factors in Complex Systems (HFICS) Conference was held from 7 – 8 October in Nottingham, UK. The conference brought together around 80 academics and practitioners working in diverse areas such as transport, healthcare, manufacturing and defence.
The programme included nine plenary oral presentation sessions and a poster session. One session was dedicated to transport. During this session, Grigore Havârneanu (Research Advisor within UIC’s Security Division) gave a presentation entitled: “The Graffolution Platform: Innovative approaches to enhance graffiti vandalism prevention”.
Graffolution (Awareness and prevention solutions against graffiti vandalism in public areas and transport) was a two-year EU FP7 collaborative research project coordinated by SYNYO in which UIC was the major representative of the railway end-users (www.project.graffolution.eu). The project focused on ‘smart responses’, multi-directional awareness and positive solutions for the wider public – including both those who are in charge of managing graffiti vandalism as well as those who construe street art as part of city regeneration, place making, creative or community action.
The talk provided a summary of research conducted in the project, an overview of its practical Graffolution platform (www.graffolution.eu), and insights into the online Graffolution Platform which includes an Open Information Hub (for the wide public) and a Collaborative Knowledge Base (for professional stakeholders).
The participants in the audience were particularly interested in the pro-social graffiti prevention strategies. They appreciated the balance between repressive and constructive strategies in graffiti prevention and agreed that innovative graffiti management should include both anti-social measures (such as surveillance, enforcement, quick graffiti removal etc.) and pro-social opportunities like encouraging artists, organising graffiti contests, promoting mural projects etc.
This presentation was another international dissemination action since the end of the Graffolution project in February 2016.
