Territory as Interface: Design for Mobile Experiences
The projects outlined in this paper represent a tremendous effort to encourage the public to engage with their environment while incorporating contemporary technology in order enhance the experience of the environment. The paper discusses two projects, one a very factual experience dealing with social history and the other a kind of hybrid ghost walk. While I feel there are equally vast amounts opportunity to implement either style of project, the factual social history project interested me more and so I asked the same question the paper asks, How can an awareness of environmental and social histories and local knowledges lead to an engagement with mobile devices outdoor spaces?
This question brought me back to the thinking behind my Pop-up AR project. I envisioned a kind of AR pop-up that greeted you at the airport upon arriving in an unfamiliar city. The idea being that it would offer basic tourist information and give a brief overview of some local customs. However, I quickly thought how could I improve the concept (I’m not the first, I’m sure many have thought the same), make it go beyond simple tourism, make it mobile, and have it be a hybrid museum-walk/GPS film around an entire city.
While travelling abroad I learned two important lessons, local knowledge is superior to anything (an obvious) and travel books fall out of date very quickly. Additionally a lot of the information you get at tourist site is stale, un-interactive, out of date and disengaging. Furthermore many people enjoy less monumental tourist sites, they enjoy going off the beaten track and are looking for a current sense of a new city, not a historical one.
A fascinating project that would be of tremendous value and could answer key points of what the question asks (and then some) is a GPS based, open source muesum-walk-of-the-city mobile application for smartphones and tablets. For example would be first time travellers to Hong Kong could walk around the city activating points that trigger various forms of media. It could be a simple text file or an edited video. Users would be getting an immediate awareness of the environment.
Fundamental to the project however is that it is open source. What this achieves is the local population contributing to the presentation of the city and thus a better, more current understand of the city and its issues. Many photo and map sites operate like this and so participation would not be an issue.
However it is not imply a tourist aid, it also engages users in the social history of a city by having traditional content, archived content and user-generated content. For example if you arrive in Hong Kong the day after a massive protest and your walking by the site where it took place, you would have no idea. If you had a GPS application like the one described while passing that site a user generated video would play on your phone and you would immediately get a very real sense of the city. When you have a better understanding of a new (or old) environment, you are able to engage and interact with it and the people that live there on a much deeper level.
Questions.
1. Would an open source mobile GPS application better engage users with their environment than closed source GPS applications, why?
2. What kind of issues can you see with the project described above?
3. Would you go out of your way (for free) to contribute to a project like the one described above in an effort to encourage people to interact with Toronto and one another on a deeper level? Why or Why not?
Matt K