March 29, 2006

A Pocket is a Place

A 'Pocket' in Urban Tapestries is the relationship a person make to a geographic place, and which can be filled with text (including HTML tags), audio, images and video clips. The original UT prototype could only create single point pockets (much like sticking a pin into a map), but we have enabled the new system to support multi-point, or polygonal, pockets. Now it is possible to mark off a whole area, such as a building or a stretch of street or a specific feature in the landscape (for instance a pond, fountain or tree). Three types of pocket can thus be created: points, lines and clusters.

What this enables is more complex relationships to places to be articulated, bringing in concepts like time and duration to the mapping of experiences, as well as knowledge and more basic information. The image below shows a Thread with several 'cluster' pockets of Coram's Fields in Bloomsbury. The cluster pockets are of a building (the Foundling Museum), a paddling pool, a cafe seating area, a petting zoo and one of the buildings.

Posted by Giles Lane at March 29, 2006 05:06 PM