IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

Locality 85
At most industry presentations on technology of this type that I’ve ever
been to, someone demonstrates a restaurant review service that enables
reviews contributed by previous customers to be accessed by somebody
outside the restaurant who is wondering whether to eat there. Many
designers and media artists are convinced that there must be more to collaborative
mapping than having lunch. In Europe, a concerted attempt to
innovate imaginative location-based services was made by more than a
hundred research institutions that participated during the late 1990s in
projects that explored the notion of ‘‘territory as interface’’—new forms of
social communication in homes, museums, streets, cafes, cars, and
schools. 33 Research and design teams divided into two groups. One,
dubbed ‘‘Connected Community,’’ looked at new interfaces and interaction
paradigms aimed at the broad population. These included ‘‘computer
support for real life’’: thinking of ways of augmenting everyday activity
rather than replacing it with a synthetic virtual one. Projects with the
theme ‘‘territory as interface’’ considered the whole territory of the community
as interface and thus the relationship between real physical spaces
and augmented ones. Researchers looked at ways to enable active participation,
to make it just as easy for people to create and leave traces of information
as it is to access that information on the Web. A second group
of projects, under the rubric ‘‘Inhabited Information Spaces,’’ looked at
ways to design and populate virtual environments in which ‘‘digital
crowds’’ could gather to participate in art and entertainment or to learn
things. Scenarios involved broadcast television linked to interactive local
content; new sensorial tools for children to use to tell stories and share
experiences; wireless devices for connecting children and parents; wearable
agents; interest-based physical navigation devices; public information systems
around a city; techniques to map and visualize information flows in
a community; interfaces for specific users; avatar-inhabited television; way
finding; exploration and social interaction within information spaces; and
new forms of social interaction such as collective memories and oral-digital
storytelling. Roger Coleman, who develops new service ideas for seniors at
the Royal College of Art in London, draws a parallel with architecture:
We know that the way you design buildings affects the relationships people have
within them. The way they relate to each other, and the shape of physical space,
affects the shape of relationships. Information has the same kind of potential in reverse.
This opens up a new dimension of design—the aesthetics of relationships.