Approaching the 'City'

Giles and I recently travelled down to the University of Surrey in Guilford to attend the "Approaching the 'City'" conference put on by the INCITE group there. We set up a beautiful series of posters that Alice and Giles put together on the various facets of Urban Tapestries, and Giles chaired a panel. I was frankly amazed at the broad variety of disciplines that all seemed to fit comfortably under the conference's umbrella of "alternative urban studies". We heard researchers from film theory, cultural and social anthropology, english studies, history, interaction design, virtual reality art, sociology, academic and corporate research labs, human geography, and of course Proboscis (choose your category!)

Eric Paulos and Elizabeth Goodman presented some fascinating research done for Intel Labs on "familiar strangers" -- those people we see all the time in our daily travels, but we don't really "know". They've developed technology that people could use to interact (anonymously!) with other familiar strangers in public spaces. Especially interesting was the device's ability to display anonymous local data about "turf" ("is this a place where people like me frequently visit?") and "tribe" ("are the people here right now like me?") Ideas like these seem like a logical next research area for Urban Tapestries -- extending it from a system about "places" to one that also includes "people in places"!