»Generating Utopia« is a realtime visualization of social location data. It aims to show what human habitats could look like if it was possible to transform them depending on the location-based behavior of their residents.

Although current discussions might indicate otherwise, the pictures we draw of ourselves within todays’ social media channels are no reliable representations of who we are in real life. We select what others get to see from our reality, and mostly, we share and publicly like only what considerably leaves a good impression on the rest of the world. We build an utopia, telling the story of what we think our lives should look like. This conclusion is all the more inspiring, regarding the fact that social networks begin to expand into physical space: we’re not only telling what we are up to, but also where we are.

»Generating Utopia« tries to make those individual utopias visible and shows, what human environments could look like if it was possible to transform them depending on location-based information of their inhabitants. The data was taken from various users of the social platform »Foursquare«. The application has been written using the Processing programming environment.