Space & Culture

The latest from Proboscis‘ Urban Tapestries and Social Tapestries projects:

Social Tapestries: public authoring and civil society (pdf)

by Giles Lane

Social Tapestries is a two year research project developing experimental uses of public authoring to demonstrate the social and cultural benefits of local knowledge sharing enabled by new mobile technologies. These playful and challenging experiments will build upon the Urban Tapestries software platform developed by Proboscis and its partners. Through collaborations and partnerships with other civil society organisations we will address situations in education, social housing, community arts and local government.

The Social Tapestries experiments aim to explore how users might engage with mobile locationspecific content in the context of ‘civil society’, building prototypes of such uses to test and understand them. It aims to outline some of the applications for public authoring that could enhance our understandings of our neighbours and our social and cultural environment. This essay outlines some of the ideas and practices that inform this project, sketching some of the rich cultural history of how artists and designers interpret and use the city as a medium.

Sensing the City and other stories (pdf)

by Katrina Jungnickel

Drawing from my experience as a team member on Urban Tapestries and Michel de Certeau’s Walking in the City (1988) this paper will explore how people narrate, annotate and explore the city from different perspectives provided by pervasive wireless application systems. It will look at how emerging technologies are enabling a reconfiguration of relationships to place, communities and activities and will briefly explore these complex shifts in social and cultural behaviours through the experimental trans-disciplinary research approaches of Urban Tapestries.

I have titled this paper Urban Tapestries: sensing the city and other stories as it became apparent when analysing the posts from the weblog of the Urban Tapestries Public Trial in December 2003 that participants were increasingly articulating their experience of the project using a multiplicity of sensory language. I intend to examine how users engaged, through a wireless location based application system in a discourse with the city and other users and how they imagined multi-sensory annotations of the urban landscape.

This entry was posted Friday, July 30th, 2004 at 8:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.