Materialising the Immaterial
The in-between is created by changes in the technologies and cultures of mobility, which results in an interstice; “a space that intervenes between one thing and another”. Everyday examples include public parks, train stations and streets. These spaces have similarities with Auge’s ‘non-places’ and can appear undervalued, transitory and disjointed from their immediate context (1995). We believe that digital technologies can re-integrate such in-between spaces into their local environment. Here, we present a series of locative media projects developed by interdisciplinary groups of architecture and digital arts students that sought to give a material presence to the immaterial qualities of space and, by doing so, elicit new forms of interaction between a space and its inhabitants. We address how interaction between the students and the local community informed the concept, development and presentation of the projects through a series of public consultation workshops and events that were held where community residents were invited to trial the projects.
Digital tools invite people to interact with urban space through in-situ and embedded experiences with digital media. When interactions are situated within the context of existing social knowledge and processes this can create a deeper understanding of place (Bilandzic et al., 2008). Traces of past activity and inhabitation, which are by their nature immaterial, can be made tangible through these digital media. A key aspect of such media is that they explore and adopt the narrative format and nonlinear frameworks to capture and reveal stories about the city. For example projects such as 34 North 118 West (Hight 2008), Urban Tapestries (Lane et al 2006, Martin 2010), Comob (Southern 2010) and 1831 Riot! (Reid et al 2005) draw on everyday social histories and mobile practices to create new relationships between people and places. These works enable new forms of shared interactions in public spaces through ad-hoc encounters and participation in event-based interaction (Willis 2010). Bridging the gap between digital and physical spaces requires transforming the way people interact with the space around them. Changes in the technologies and cultures of mobility result in a hybrid of new and existing patterns and systems and architectural programmes emerge.
The collaboration between architecture and digital arts students explored how new forms of interactions in in-between spaces can be elicited through design interventions. The projects use locative media to suggest new ways of experiencing the built environment as both physical and digital space by embedding and revealing the immaterial aspects and information in the space, past present and future (see Fig 1). These projects were situated in Devonport, a neighbourhood of Plymouth with a long and complicated history of urban change, where physical divides, historical changes, social policies and natural boundaries have created distinct but co-present communities and complicated in-between spaces.
1 Visualising the ‘trail through time’ application (Layar), Devonport, February 2012
By reflecting on the types of situated interaction that people experience with these socially and spatially located technologies we begin to understand the effect they might have on our experience of public space. In particular we consider whether revealing such layers can contribute towards a ‘social glue’ - where feeling of social connection is strengthened through a shared experience (with or without technology) (Churchill, 2010).
References
- Auge, M. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London/NY: Verso Books
- Bilandzic, M.; Foth, M.; De Luca, A. (2008). CityFlocks: designing social navigation for urban mobile information systems, DIS '08: Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 174-183.
- Hight, J. (2003). Narrative Archaeology (www.xcp.bfn.org/hight.html). Retrieved 13 June 2008
Lane G, Thelwall S, Angus A, Peckett V & West N (2006). Urban Tapestries: Public Authoring, Place & Mobility. Proboscis - Martin, K. (2010). Making Glue: Participation in Everyday Computing in
- Willis, K., Chorianopoulos, K., Struppek, M., Roussos, G. (Eds) (2010). Shared Encounters. New York u.a.: Springer.
- Reid, J., Hull, R., Cater, K. and Clayton, B. (2005). Riot! 1831: The design of a location based audio drama. Proceedings of 3rd UK-UbiNet Workshop 2005. February 2005.
- Southern, J. (2010). Comob Project, http://www.comob.org.uk/ (retrieved 15th February 2012)
- Willis, K., Chorianopoulos, K., Struppek, M., Roussos, G. (Eds) (2010). Shared Encounters. New York u.a.: Springer.