Place
25 posts tagged.
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Sniff
Made with Sara Johansson and Einar Sneve Martinussen as part of the Touch project . Sniff is a soft toy dog that 'sniffs' and reacts to objects that come close to his nose. More…
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Skål
Made with Einar Sneve Martinussen and Jørn Knutsen as part of the Touch project . Skål is a media player designed for the home that lets you interact with digital media using physical objects. You place objects in a wooden bowl to play back related media on the TV. More…
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You are here
A 2006 note on collecting images of ‘you are here’ marks, or ideo locators, at Flickr. The relationship to local physical space is what makes them work: mapping with a point of view, maps as a direct interface to the world. The best example to date is from Seoul, where 3D cross sections of a metro station are directly related to the point at which you are looking at the map.
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Graphic language for touch
How do we mark up the physical world so people know what’s touchable, and what happens when they touch it? A set of icons I sketched to find out, presented at Design Engaged in Berlin in November 2005.
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Design Engaged 2005
Three days of conversation, urban exploration and brainstorming in Berlin, November 2005, the second Design Engaged. Adam Greenfield opened on energy decline and the coming implications for design, Anne Galloway on the parliament of things, Joshua Kaufman on the politics of artefacts, Fabio Sergio on whether interaction design has any material at all. Design Engaged 2005, organised by Andrew Otwell for a second year. Raw notes from three days of sessions, preserved as written at the time. Speakers included Adam Greenfield, Matt Ward, Joshua Kaufman, Anne Galloway, Michelle Chang, Thomas Vander Wal, Louise Klinker, Malcolm McCullough, Fabio Sergio, Stefan Smagula, Chris Heathcote, Jyri Engeström and Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, Matt Webb, Nurri Kim, Jack Schulze, Régine Debatty, Liz Goodman, Eric Rodenbeck with Michal Migurski (Stamen), Molly Wright Steenson, John Poisson and Ben Cerveny. Restorative feeling of getting together The architecture of participation Experience design is participation design Ethical and social implications of ubicomp Has been reading far afield: Out of Gas , Dark Age Ahead , Collapse Growth and decline Models of growth: 1. Health of economy is based on growth 2. Continuous growth: technological singularity, going off the charts 3.
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Graffiti as conversation
A short 2005 observation: photographing layers of conversation in graffiti, tagged ‘conversation’ on Flickr, prior art for thinking about spatial annotation on shared public surfaces.
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Spatial memory at Design Engaged 2004
Presentation notes from Design Engaged 2004 in Amsterdam. Two related strands: the Time that land forgot project with Even Westvang (five months, 8000 photos, visualised by date and time of day), and the research on marking in urban public space.
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Design Engaged 2004
Twenty-odd designers, researchers and writers sat around a long table in Amsterdam over a weekend in November 2004, taking turns to present. These are my notes, session-by-session, as written at the time. Design Engaged 2004 was an invitation-only gathering organised by Andrew Otwell. A small, intense weekend of conversation that turned out to be one of the generative moments of the design-web at that period. The FAQ has the full list of attendees. There are also lots of photos on Flickr . The growth of the soil How do we comprehend complexity How do we build structures around complex information Accreting meta-data: GPS data, descriptive information Break down of material as it hits the soil Soup, tags, condensed and distilled meta objects Sorting mechanisms, affinity browsers, related, filtering, emergent relationships, interrelationships How do we conceive a metaphor for building these processes? A structure that is meaningful for the users. Application design: movement through states of application to tending a flow of processes Tending to meta-data is a growth process DLA: diffusion-limited aggregation, a natural process model The relationships between metadata can be visualised as this.
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Public marking photographs
A short September 2004 pointer to a Flickr set of images of stickering, graffiti and flyposting , supporting material for the research into spatial annotation. There’s an ever-updated selection under the “ marking ” tag on Flickr. See the Design Engaged 2004 presentation for fuller context.
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ISEA 2004 conference
A short 2004 note from ISEA, the International Symposium on Electronic Art, held that year on a Silja Line ferry between Helsinki, Stockholm, Mariehamn and Tallinn. Polarfront kept event notes through the run, and Grandtextauto covered the installations and artwork.
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Time that land forgot
A 2004 project with Even Westvang from the Iceland inside-and-out workshop, a prototype for contextualising photographs by time and geography, designed to shift the balance of representation away from pure location and towards image and time.
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Photography and mapping from Afar
My contribution to ‘Afar’, an exhibition in Copenhagen where 25 international artists produced work to brief. For three months I recorded every walk, drive, train journey and flight I took while photographing daily life. Nine boards of images paired with GPS tracks drawn as simple lines show the transition from London to Oslo across a winter and spring.
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Geo-referenced photography
The simplest way to link a photograph to a location is to combine two time-stamps: one from the digital camera, one from the GPS receiver. Given both sets of timestamps over the same period, a series of images and tracklogs can be processed to stamp each image with location metadata. Compiled in July 2004 at the Hofn workshop in Iceland, during the work that became Time that land forgot . A working reference list of papers, projects, guidelines, tools and the technical issues that surrounded geo-referenced photography at that moment. Most of the links below are now dead; the list is preserved as a snapshot of what the state of the art looked like in 2004. Position-annotated Photographs: The Geotemporal Web GEOREP: Digital Library for Spatial Data Geographic location tags on digital images, Microsoft Portable digital photo album Tokyo Picturesque ( details ) Habitat Perspectives Photo Location ( metadata notes ) Geo Snapper WWMX web demo Good list of other photo mapping projects Commercial applications and scripts that link photographs to geographic information: Robophoto 93 Photo Street Photofusion Media Mapper OziPhotoTool GPS photo link GPS TrackMaker QuakeMap WWMX Travelogue app…
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Loop city workshop
Bill Hillier at University College London describes cities as movement economies, the structure of a city is the pattern of people moving through it. The workshop took this as the starting point and spent two days walking that idea across related fields: spatial organisation, relative space, time-space, taxicab geometry, mental mapping, text maps. Notes from the Loop City workshop at the Outside In symposium in Gothenburg, Sweden, June 2004. The workshop was led by Dietmar Offenhuber and Sara Hodges with participants from the symposium, working across geography, architecture, mapping and locative media. Raw notes below. spacesyntax.com Space explorers : children, homeless, vendors, skateboarders Space utilisers : commuters, workers Exocentric : external, connected Egocentric : centred, point of view Large, diverse research field Abler, Adams and Gould: Spatial Organization: The Geographer’s View of the World Expressing thematic data through spatial differentiation Political maps based on size of army Map of USA based on Elvis concerts Irina Vasiliev: Design Issues for Mapping Time Time as a way of measuring space (one conclusion: the world is shrinking) Grid systems make diagonal m…
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Mobile outskirts workshop
A bus full of GPS receivers, cameras and impromptu artworks drove fifteen hours from Trondheim up to the islands of Lofoten. The workshop wiki and media archive are being kept updated via fairly limited wireless coverage. A short dispatch from the Mobile Outskirts workshop in Lofoten, June 2004, part of the Trans-cultural Mapping workshop series . A painless and creative bus drive up the Norwegian coast.
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Outside In
Outside In was a two-day forum at Röda Sten in Gothenburg on 14–15 June 2004, about new voices, media and practices in the design and use of public space. The venue is extraordinary: below a suspension bridge, surrounded by huge concrete creations. Really windy outside, calm inside the lecture space. These are my notes from the talks, written on the day. Occasional asides in italics are things I’ve added looking back. I’ve left the note form mostly as-is. (I missed the first workshop of the day.) Putting memories in spaces. Spaces aren’t the same after having been disrupted. After ‘Reclaim the Streets’ or a Circle Line party you can’t see the space in the same way. Distinction between public and private. What is it? Public space doesn’t exist anymore. Ken Livingstone’s new City Hall is half-private, half-public, private investment was involved in the building, so protests cannot happen outside. Do we need institutions in order to do events? Is that the only way to do them legally? What’s stopping people from doing these things is not necessarily capitalism but the fear of looking like a pillock. Self-regulation is a big factor. Can spark things to let down inhibitions or shackles. Example of the scooter, became a kids’ toy and then it wasn’t cool anymore.
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Mobile social software applications
A list of mobile social software applications from 2004: Jabberwocky tracking familiar strangers, Fluidtime routing public transport in Turin, Dodgeball pinging your friends when they’re within ten blocks of you, Plazes tagging your location for the public, Mamjam chatting with others at the same venue by SMS. The first wave of location-aware social services, before smartphones. A growing list I compiled in June 2004 during early PhD research into mobile and locative systems. Descriptions below are taken from each project’s own site. Most of the projects are long gone; the list is preserved as a snapshot of what mobile social software looked like before the iPhone. Companion to the spatial annotation projects list . This research project explores our often ignored yet real relationships with Familiar Strangers. We describe several experiments and studies that lead to a design for a personal, body-worn, wireless device that extends the Familiar Stranger relationship while respecting the delicate, yet important, constraints of our feelings and relationships with strangers in pubic places. A visualization tool based on Mobster that enables users to explore their social encounters in new ways.
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Spatial annotation projects
A reference list I compiled in June 2004 during early PhD research into locative media and spatial annotation. It includes Murmure in Vancouver’s Chinatown, Yellow Arrow stickers, Grafedia’s hyperlinked handwritten text, Urban Tapestries and dozens of others. The list is preserved as a snapshot of a field at a particular moment.
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Transcultural mapping workshops
A brief announcement from May 2004. Two workshops on the calendar this summer. The Transcultural Mapping workshop (‘Mobile outskirts: cultural mapping of northern geographical outposts’), in Lofoten in June, looking at GPS and photography in remote Norwegian coastal places. The Loop City workshop at the Outside In symposium (‘Emerging expressions, interventions and participation in public space’) in Gothenburg shortly after, on walking and mapping urban public space with Bill Hillier of Space Syntax. Update: new workshop website .
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Public markup
Early PhD research into the marking of public space: the physical annotation of the city through stickering, graffiti and billboards. It looks for patterns in visibility, techniques, process, location, content and audience, and argues that the new short-range digital technologies, especially RFID, should be designed the same way. Not invisible.
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Creative Crossings workshop
A triangular research network, practitioners from Britain, Canada and Finland, gathered in London to work on participatory and creative applications for mobile, locative and cross-platform media. Organised by m-cult, the Banff Centre and Arts Council England in April 2004.
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Urban GPS experience
Three months of trying to record a clean dataset of GPS tracks to geo-locate my photography, in Oslo and London. Notes on what the Garmin GPS Map 60c does and doesn’t do in dense European cities, from the pavement and from public transport.
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Travelogue
A 2004 note on treating digital photography as a narrative medium, sequences of photos that suggest movement, place, stories and journeys. With plans to tag each image with a GPS coordinate so the sequence carries place as well as time.
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Architecture theory books
This is one of a series of reading lists I put together between 2002 and 2004 when I was starting out in interaction and experience design, building out a personal canon from books I was buying, borrowing from libraries, or lending to students. The lists are grouped by topic. Architecture is the parent discipline of a lot of interaction design thinking, and this list is the shelf I was reading on the theory side: space, the city, urbanism, and the politics of the built environment. Calvino’s Invisible Cities is the book I keep giving to people. Bachelard’s Poetics of Space is the phenomenological counterpart, both are worth reading slowly. Bernard Tschumi’s Architecture and Disjunction and Manhattan Transcripts are the most polemical of the theoretical books. William J. Mitchell’s City of Bits and E-topia are the early digital-urbanism texts that most directly speak to interaction designers working on networked spaces. The Amazon links below are what I had at the time, most will be dead now, but the ISBNs will find you a copy. M. Christine Boyer. amazon.co.uk / amazon.com Nick Barley. amazon.co.uk / amazon.com Manuel Gausa. amazon.co.uk / amazon.com Norman Foster. amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
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Mobile interaction design case study
A 2001 case study of consultancy work for Pollen Mobile, written up as it happened. Jack Schulze, Adi Nachman and I designed the interaction architecture for Mamjam, a location-based social entertainment service built on SMS, letting people in the same venue chat with each other by text.