Giles Lane of Proboscis follows up my earlier item about neighbourhood communications with news that you can now view the results of the Urban Tapestries project through a flashbrowser. Once registered you can see how, during trials, people created text and image items to 'attach' to places in central London and view these by 'pocket', thread, and clickable map.
The Urban Tapestries software platform allows people to author their own virtual annotations of the city, enabling a community’s collective memory to grow organically, allowing ordinary citizens to embed social knowledge in the new wireless landscape of the city. People can add new locations, location content and the ‘threads’ which link individual locations to local contexts, which are accessed via handheld devices such as PDAs and mobile phones.
Urban Tapestries seeks to understand why people would use emerging pervasive technologies, what they could do with them and how we can make this possible. It seeks to enable people as their own authors and agents, not merely as consumers of content provided to them by telecoms and media corporations. The project centres on a fundamental human desire to ‘map’ and 'mark’ territory as part of belonging and of feeling a sense of ownership of our environment.
I understand Giles is planning another project. I think he and his partners are onto something important about the potential for people to use new technology to interact with their environment. You can see a couple of animations that bring this home, linked from here.
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