NMK – New Media Knowledge have just published an article on UT based on the presentation at PLAN.
Urban Tapestries: Experimental Ethnography, Technological Identities and Place
Roger Silverstone and Zoetanya Sujon
Abstract
Urban Tapestries provides a mobile location-based platform to connect people with the places they inhabit through their stories, experiences and observations. Currently based on an 802.11b mesh network in the heart of London, ordinary people author their stories of the city and embed them in the places that inspire them. Others who are logged into the system can read these stories, author their own and engage the largely invisible, multidimensional layers accumulating in the city. Our research asks if people use UT in meaningful and interesting ways. Drawing from theories of everyday life and urban space, we have developed experimental ethnography as a method for investigating the relationships between communication technologies, users and the socio-geographic territories around them. Respondents are asked to play with an early Urban Tapestries prototype and this research explores what they do, their technological identities, their relationship to place and the meanings they generate. Urban Tapestries facilitates the negotiation of boundaries and we found that it does augment notions of connectivity - to place and to those within that place. However, our research revealed that some do not interpret this connectivity positively.
Download the Electronic Working Paper as a PDF file.
We've been graced by the presence of Natalie Jeremijenko this past week as she begins her EPSRC Visiting Fellowship with Proboscis. Our plan is to investigate the potential of bridging her Feral Robotic experiments with Urban Tapestries to create new opportunities for social engagement around issues of local pollution and envirnmental issues.
In addition to our own technical, operational and contextual discussions we've also had discussions with Space Studios and the London Knowledge Lab about collaborating on sites, community engagement and learning research, all generating much excitement and opportunity for a broad set of outcomes to emerge.
The Fellowship/Collaborations will build towards a public event in the late Summer where we hope to release some robots into a public space in partnership with local people.
I gave a talk today at the PLAN [Pervasive and Locative Arts Network] event which was somewhat rushed so have put a PDF version of it online for those who wanted to know more:
From Urban Tapestries to Social Tapestries