Spatial Media Group

Urban Tapestries is an exploration into the potential costs and benefits of public authoring, that is, mapping and sharing of local knowledge using pervasive user-generated media. The aim of this investigation is to reveal the potential of pervasive computing to create and support relationships that extend beyond established social and cultural boundaries and enable the development of new practices based around place, identity and community. In this paper, we report on the work carried out within UT since its inception in 2002 discussing all relevant aspects from its background, approach and its technical development. We also identify the main findings of this work related to the use of pervasive computing to support pervasive user-generated content and identify some of the main questions that require further investigation.

What happens when you can access all the world’s media, but the access is constrained by screen size, bandwidth, attention, and battery life? We present a novel mobile contextaware software prototype that enables access to images on the go. Our prototype utilizes the channel metaphor to give users contextual access to media of interest according to key dimensions: spatial, social, and topical. Our experimental prototype attempts to be playful and simple to use, yet provide powerful and comprehensive media access. A temporally-driven sorting scheme for media items allows quick and easy access to items of interest in any dimension. For ad-hoc tasks, we extend the application with keyword search to deliver the long tail of media and images. Elements of social interaction and communication around the photographs are built into the mobile application, to increase user engagement. The application utilizes Flickr.com as an image and social-network data source, but could easily be extended to support other websites and media formats.

With the institutionalization and commercialization of locative technical infrastructures such as the global positioning system (GPS), the physical world is increasingly becoming one of ubiquitous locatability as well as connectability. This technical backdrop has proven to be an incubator for location-based applications and services, which in turn are engendering a new set of practices. When these practices involve interactions between people, we might call them 'socio-locative.' My research utilizes interviews and artifact tracking to establish a grounded ethnographic understanding of the motivations behind and impacts of these new socio-locative practices. The study design focuses on two social practices that have locative and non-locative variants: photo sharing on Flickr (with and without geotags) and broadcast microbloging via Jaiku (locative) and Twitter (nonlocative). My expected findings include a greater awareness of a new type of hybrid social space that bonds the virtual and material, as well as insights into how locative metadata acts as an organizing force for social interaction.

Our physical bodies play a central role in shaping human experience in the world, understanding of the world, and interactions in the world. This paper draws on theories of embodiment — from psychology, sociology, and philosophy — synthesizing five themes we believe are particularly salient for interaction design: thinking through doing, performance, visibility, risk, and thick practice. We intro-duce aspects of human embodied engagement in the world with the goal of inspiring new interaction design ap-proaches and evaluations that better integrate the physical and computational worlds