Recording the environment: creating an archive of ambience

6th International Space Syntax …, 2007

This paper reports on recent investigations within an ongoing research project, which aims at developing a better understanding of the urban landscape augmented with the digital landscape in the heritage City of Bath. Here early findings are described from the deployment of a socialiasing digital installation in various locations in the city. The aim is to create a novel urban experience that triggers shared social encounters among friends, observes or strangers. The installation is implemented in the form of a digital urban ground, embeded in the physical surrounding, which acts as a non-traditional interface and a facilitator between people and between people and their surrounding environment. This paper explores the relationship between the urban space and technology driven encounters. The initial findings is outlined about how people move, congregate and socialize around the digital ground and illustrate the impact of the spatial and syntactical properties on the type of shared interactions in a city context. Finally, the initial results are discussed and the ongoing work is described briefly.

Multimedia Tools and Applications, 2013

Ambient media are novel, and this new media form alters our daily-living experience in many ways. Ambient media refer to media environments that are embedded throughout the natural space where people are following their daily activities. These digital media environments become part of the living space and altering our daily-living experience in many ways. The goal of this article is to elaborate the status of ambient media today and to forecast how ambient media will develop in the next decade. It clearly identifies megatrends and develops scenarios (e. g., ambient-assisted living) for the future. These scenarios shall shed light on the potentials and give a glimpse on the potential future development of embedding digital objects into the daily living space. This paper is based on a future wheel Multimed Tools Appl approach and on an analysis of the results of an expert workshop. The article concludes with a discussion of the results and an evaluation of the impact of each scenario.

IEEE Multimedia, 2000

Maria, Brazil in terms of memory and the role of place as integrative of experience. Our paper poses the question "What constitutes the memory of community as a collective process of (re)collection?" and seeks answers in the locative technologies used by the participants to (re)activate and (re)purpose the spacetime of experience through an artwork entitled airCity:arte#ocupaSM. Using a research/creation methodology the researchers sought to produce mappings of relation which constitute the "groundwork" of memory by integrating information derived from sensing and geolocation devices and traditional audiovisual technologies.

Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, 2014

Multimedia Tools and Applications

Although overshadowed by visual information, sound plays a central role in how people perceive an environment. The effect of a landscape is enriched by its soundscape, that is, the stratification of all the acoustic sources that, often unconsciously, are heard. This paper presents a framework for archiving, browsing, and accessing soundscapes, either remotely or on-site. The framework is based on two main components: a web-based interface to upload and search the recordings of an acoustic environment, enriched by in- formation about geolocation, timing, and context of the recording; and a mobile app to browse and listen to the recordings, using an interactive map or GPS information. To populate the archive, we launched two crowdsourcing initiatives. An initial experiment examined the city of Padua’s soundscape through the participation of a group of undergraduate students. A broader experiment, which was proposed to all people in Italy, aimed at tracking how the nationwide COVID-19 ...

2006

Abstract This paper describes the design, application, and refinement of a qualitative tool designed to study sense of place. The Place Probe incorporates a range of stimuli and techniques aimed at articulating a person's sense of place. It has been developed, used, and undergone three revisions. The paper describes the background to the choice of measures that were included in the Place Probe and describes its application in both a physical place and a virtual representation of that place.

The paper focuses on the role of digital annotations in making places. Three examples of mobile applications that support the addition of digital content in relation to particular locations are introduced (foursquare, Airbnb and Discover Limerick- an application developed localy). We look at how digital annotations add a new dimension to the physical spaces and alter the perceptions of those visiting them.

Since the late 1980’s, researchers have been working on a “post-desktop” agenda for human- computer interaction known as ubiquitous computing. Visions for ubiquitous computing have been based around notions of embeddedness and invisibility: where mobile, networked and context-aware technologies are incorporated into the environments and objects of our everyday lives, and where the infrastructures required to operate them remain largely invisible. As this vision becomes partially realised, the focus of ubiquitous computing research has begun to shift towards considering the broader social and cultural aspects and implications of these developments. In addition to conceiving of their technologies as embedded and embeddable within built environments and objects, researchers are therefore beginning to recognise that they are equally embedded within social and cultural practices, interactions and productions. Particularly, as technologies find themselves in diverse environmental and social contexts, researchers are being asked to critically assess the role and potential their technologies have in both defining and shaping the spaces of our everyday lives, and the ways in which we understand them. This research provides one such critical account of ubiquitous computing, approached through the frame (and reframing) of space. Whereas human-computer interaction has long sought to learn from and mimic physical interactions with the world, where spatial metaphors and conventions have been exploited in the design and implementation of interactive systems, critical accounts of the ways in which technologies reside in and help create spaces remain relatively under explored. As such, this research examines the relationship between ubiquitous technologies, the spaces of our everyday lives and the understandings we have of them. It does so through a cross-disciplinary engagement with cultural geography and the ethnographic practices of sociology and anthropology. It reframes the notion of space inherent in ubiquitous technologies away from one that equates it to a Cartesian representation of the world, or a source of metaphors, towards one that positions it as a social and cultural production. Building on this foundation, two multi-sited ethnographic studies with a state government organisation, Parks Victoria, are presented that demonstrate various productions of space in practice. Based on analysis of these studies, a series of design inspirations are presented that reframe space as emergent and seasonal processes. Drawing on these design inspirations, two design concepts are presented that are envisioned for use within Parks Victoria: Habitat, a location- based platform for tacit knowledge, and Wayfarer, a visualisation and narrative tool for situated understandings. A reflection on these related pieces of research will then serve to highlight new, practical directions for further work in ubiquitous computing that incorporates perspectives from the social sciences, and moves beyond the typical divides between ‘work’ and ‘non-work’, ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ contexts.

In recent years, the vast increase in information flows has made it possible to instantly connect location-dependent information with physical spaces. These technologies have provided new forms of the representation of space as much as new forms of perception through tools and techniques used in land surveying, remote sensing, etc. From a critical point of view, pervasive computing, location-based applications, or, in other words, “locative media” provide an interesting framework to understand how these technologies relate to our understanding of space and place. Concretely, we want to examine how the uses of locative media in social-oriented artworks interact with people’s sense of place. This article therefore discusses contemporary theories on space related to media and technology with a specific focus on the conceptualization of the notion of place. It also relates these theories to the study of different locative media artworks: Canal Accessible (2006), Bio Mapping (2004), Disappearing Places (2007), and Coffee Deposits (2010). We contend that locative media artworks act upon distinctive ways to understand the mediation of technology in current placemaking practices.