Category: Mapping

Loop city workshop

h3. Bill Hillier: Cities are movement economies

* http://www.spacesyntax.com/

h3. In the city there are

* space explorers: children, homeless, vendors, skateboarders,
* space utilisers: commuters, workers,

h3. Two ways of looking at the city

* exocentric: external, connected
* egocentric: centred, point of view,

h3. Spatial organisation

* Large, diverse research field.
* Abler, Ronald Adams: ‘Spatial organisation: the geographer’s view
of the world’

h3. Relative space

* Expressing thematic data through spatial differentiation

h3. Scaling areas according to non-geographic data

* Political maps based on size of army
* Map of USA based on Elvis concerts

h3. Time space

* Irina Vasiliev: ‘Design issues for mapping time’
* Time as a way of measuring space (one conclusion: world is
shrinking)

h3. Taxicab geography

* Grid systems make diagonal movement problematic
* There is study of movement in grid spaces, showing multiple optimum routes: a big L shape is the same distance as a zig-zag.
* The grid is no longer in Euclidian space

h3. Social space

* Philip Thiel: Spatial annotation methods

h3. John S. Adams:

* Human geographer

h3. mapped human interaction over 1 day

* vertical axis: time
* horizontal axis: distance
* made 3D diagrams of this multi-dimensional space, showing relative
distances travelled and communicated with over 1 day.
* Social network maps

h3. Mental mapping

* spatial representations of the brain or memory
* In some ways the analysis by Lynch and others has failed, because
they focused on trying to know everything about people’s mental
maps of the city.
* Richard Long: walking project

h3. Imagined cities

* Norman Klein: History of forgetting
* Fictional writers form mental models of cities
* Calvino

h3. Textmaps

* Dietmar recreated the shape of LA by phoning people and asking
directions
* PML maps

h3. Single parameter mapping

* Boylan height maps: Denis Wood
* Maps of Halloween lanterns in an area

h3. Multiple parameter mapping

* Correlating space
* Chernoff faces: iconographic representations of faces, with
expressions that map to different social conditions
* Eugene Turner
* Correlating socio-economic factors is common

h3. Mapping as a game

* Raoul Bunschoten

h3. Narrowed the analysis of space down to very simple
p rocedures

* erasure
* origination
* transformation
* migration
* Mapped results as a synthesis?

h3. Photographic / media mapping

* Tokyo Nobody
* Images with text removed, replaced with a textmap
* Text / image project… ?
* Graffiti archaeology project
* Time lapse as a tool: mapping crowds
* Threshold linear key as a tool: RCA project…

h3. Diagrammatic / information mapping

* Tufte
* Information diagrams representing time, space, actions, events,
people, cause/effect etc.

h3. Collaborative mapping

* multiple authorship over shared themes

h3. Sarah

* Presented her NY Green space project, in which access to green
space is correlated with socio-economic factors. Refer to Social
design notes weblog.

h3. Some ideas for mapping

* Children’s tactile book: sandpaper for Asphalt, felt for grass.
* Litter, sky cover, text, colours, people, edges, boundaries, nodes
* Use gps and digital camera. Use a compass to always orient the
camera to North, or relevant reference. Then map the space with
textures or sky cover (down or up). Could make a great map.
* A method for collaborative presentation might be to use a projector
to trace physical space onto a wall or large open space, then to
layer drawn annotations. A public presentation could be achieved by
projecting digital data (photos, textures, movement) onto this
annotated area, for interesting layered correlations.
* Everyone has their own agenda when approaching a space: personal
ways of looking, awareness, attractions and unnatractions. Could
try to map what a space makes you think instantly, from one vantage
point, or multiple, correlated vantage points.
* Bluetooth mapping of devices. Our personal ‘Auras’ are becoming
public and this might be useful for mapping.
h3. What kind of data can we collect about the city and it’s usage,
that is really reliable and plentiful? The audioscrobbler mapping
example shows how really simple data can be mapped into
extraordinary useful spatial representations, just because it’s
high quality and plentiful.
* Geographic data is potentially plentiful, because there is a lot of
effort put into mapping space.
* What other things are mapped with effort, or easily?
—–

Mobile outskirts workshop

There is a “workshop wiki”:http://locative.rixc.lv/tcm/workshops/index.cgi?Location_Norway and “media archive”:http://aware.uiah.fi/packet/?id=TCM that we are attempting to keep updated via fairly limited wireless coverage.

A painless and creative 15 hour bus drive took us from Trondheim up to the islands of Lofoten, in a bus full of GPS receivers, cameras and “impromptu artworks”:http://www.boutiquevizique.com/analoGps/.

Outside In

Outside In is a forum for involving new voices, media and practices in a discourse about the use and design of public space. It took place from 14 – 15 June 2004.

Roda Sten is amazing, below a suspension bridge, with huge concrete creations. Really windy, but calm inside the lecture space. Here are my notes and a few pictures.

!/images/outsidein01.jpg!
!/images/outsidein02.jpg!
!/images/outsidein03.jpg!
!/images/outsidein04.jpg!
!/images/outsidein05.jpg!
!/images/outsidein06.jpg!
!/images/outsidein07.jpg!
!/images/outsidein08.jpg!
!/images/outsidein09.jpg!
!/images/outsidein10.jpg!
!/images/outsidein11.jpg!

h2. Day 1

h3. Session 2: Hacking the streets (I missed the 1st workshop)

h3. Space Hijackers

* Putting memories in spaces: spaces arent the same after having been disrupted. after ‘reclaim the streets’ or a ‘circle line party’ you can’t see the space in the same way.
* Distinction between public and private. What is it?
* Public space doesn’t exist anymore.
* Ken’s new city hall is half private half public (private investment was involved in the building, so protests cannot happen outside)
* Do we need institutions in order to do events, is that the only way to do it legally?
* What’s stopping people from doing these things is not necessarily capitalism, but the fear of looking like a pillock: self-regulation is a big factor. Can spark things to let down inhibitions or shackles. Uses example of the scooter, became a kids toy and then it wasn’t cool anymore.
* What’s the connection between anarchism and these spontaneous events. Emergent order is interesting, so much control over actions, and the ways people move through the city. How does this relate to anarchy? Is this anarchy?

h3. Zevs

* The city is a workshop: not just walls to tag
* Shadows of urban furniture: really good
* Visual kidknapping: Lavazza woman gets cut out of the frame
* Big poster with bleeding eyes
* Uses a high pressure water jet to clean the city, but also write at the same time.
* Digs at the notion of authorship, a site where people find work on the streets
* The work is anonymous, but there is the projection of authorial control behind it, its individual and definitely authored
* Would be interesting to explore more about Graffiti authorship: how do public artists want to be recognised?
* Managing the mystique around the work and the author.
* Difference between author/instigator
* “Interview”:http://www.paris-art.com/modules-modload-interviews-travail-1592.html
* “Visual kidknapping”:http://www.visual-kidnapping.org/

h3. 3D bombing: Akim

* Polystyrene models, matched to fit specific city spaces
* City of names: what if the writers are the ones who build the houses?

h2. Day 2

h3. Session 3: Network experience

h3. “Jonah Brucker Cohen”:http://coin-operated.com/

* Wants to deconstruct network context
* Context: physical and social situation in which computation sits
* How does the network affect the output and experience
* Companies are claiming ownership of space because of signal
strength: strengthening signals to drown out free competion
* WiFihog: saps out all wifi bandwidth
* LAN party versus Flash Mob
* Simpletext: collaborative sms image searching on large screens
* re-mapping and changing the context of interfaces: what about
shifting consequences: changing the input/output relationship.
* Simpletext project: assigns an image search to inputted text
messages, and displays via jitter/max on a large screen.
* Steven Levy quote on hackers

h3. “Katherine Moriwaki”:http://kakirine.com/

* Altering space by altering the body
* character of a space
* remnants of things, people, individuals
* put magnets on wrists and fingers and bodies to reveal the proximity of electronic devices: unexpected connections to other people and lampposts. Nice.

h3. Data Climates: Pedro Sep?lveda Sandoval

* Living in a scanscape city
* electronic space, synthetic city
* Congestion charge as walled city, in electronic space
* London: highest density of cctv in the world
* will we decide to travel to areas based on the quality of electronic space
* A new architectural language for electronic space
* Houses without windows, just cameras. Can start to control life inside. Can also choose to use the weather channel as windows
* Pay a fee for personal surveillance: ask them to watch you all the way to the supermarket.
* The city of Yokohama was brought down by the coming of age party for 40,000 teenagers: the networks were overloaded with messages, because the teenagers didn’t want to talk face to face.
* Palm trees as cell towers (seen in south africa)
* Looked at a community in Hackney that were campaigning to not have a cell phone tower.
* Designed a house for them that would shield them from the signals, but they would have to give up cell phone connectivity. Designed it so that windows would open and close based on calls being made, or would give them 10 minute windows in which to make calls every 2 hours.
* Digital shelter: stand inside the line

h3. Round up

* These presentations all use the strategy of showing ‘hypothetical products’ that are really non-products. They are doing this, rather than providing platforms or design methodologies, or distributing resources and infrastructures for people to design their own systems. I understand the need for designers as visionaries, but this could be made more valuable and useful.
* specialists in electronic space could be similar to lighting design specialists in the ’70s. Will grow into a general field of understanding.
* Platforms and inftrastructure for technology is beyond architects, but understanding of the use and consequences is really important.

h3. Session 4

h3. Jocko Weyland

* Skateboarding as adaptive design: difference between skate parks and the street, skate parks become designed over time to mimic certain aspects of streets, but also according to innate, human skaters needs. A combination of factors go into making a good skateboarding space: free, alcohol, quality, location.

h3. Swoon

* New to NY: wanted to work outside gallery space, was inspired by collage of city streets. Not from a graffiti background, being a female, can do certain things outside the norms of graffiti.
* Changes billboards during the day, looks official.
* Open democratic visual space
* a visual direct democracy…
* Cuba used to have street art as a means of free expression, but outlawed by dictatorship
* Makes lightboxes with imagined cities, and mounts on the reverse side of construction site walls, with peepholes ‘peer here’
* Interesting mix of opportunism and ‘designed intervention’
* Sometimes driven purely by visual interest.

h3. “Michael Rakowitz”:http://www.possibleutopia.com/mike/

* Mike Davis: Public is phantom
* Bedouin as a model of sustainable nomadic communities
* Homeless use waste air from air conditioning (airvac exhaust ports) to stay warm and dry
* Homeless have receded to the peripheral vision of the public. Want to see and be seen.
* Seeing is important for living nomadically in the city.
* Started to map the heat and the power of the exhaust fans in the city. Found a high one at MIT plasma lab.
* Re-routed smell from from a bakery to an art gallery, to subvert a ‘high art’ re-appropriation of space

h2. Workshop ‘Loop City’

* “Dietmar Offenhuber”:http://residence.aec.at/wegzeit/ & Sara Hodges
* Showed Rybczynski’s film “New Book”:http://www.microcinema.com/titleResults.php?content_id=1190 using 9 frames: a good way of mapping space in the city. Starts off and the viewer is not sure if each frame is occurring synchronously, or in the same space, but a bus passes between all of the frames and the spatial link is made immediately. There is also a point where a plane flies overhead and all the actors look up: showing time synchronicity too.

h3. Looking at the city

* as a set of repeated actions
* as a playground: situationists
* as a balance of social as well as physical architectures

Spatial annotation projects

!/images/yellowarrow01.jpg(Yellow Arrow)!:http://www.yellowarrow.org

p(caption). Image from Yellow Arrow project.

h3. “Murmure”:http://www.murmure.ca/

An archival audio project that has collected stories set in specific locations throughout Vancouver’s Chinatown. At each of these locations, a murmur sign marks the availability of a story with a telephone number and location code. By using a mobile phone, people can listen to the story of that place while engaging in the full physical experience of being there. Some stories suggest that the listener walk around, following a certain path through a place, while others allow a person to wander with both their feet and their gaze.

h3. “Area Code”:http://www.areacode.org.uk/

Invites you to collect and reflect upon your immediate environment, and enables new forms of engagement and information exchange between person and place. Areacode aims to inspire comments about the affect of urban regeneration in the city.

h3. “Yellow Arrow”:http://www.yellowarrow.org

A physical sticker allows people to mark places of interest, then tell a story about it using a photographic record.

h3. “Grafedia”:http://www.grafedia.net/

Grafedia is hyperlinked text, written by hand onto physical surfaces and linking to rich media content – images, video, sound files, and so forth. It can be written anywhere – on walls, in the streets, or in bathroom stalls. Grafedia can also be written in letters or postcards, on the body as tattoos, or anywhere you feel like putting it. Viewers “click” on these grafedia hyperlinks with their cell phones by sending a message addressed to the word + “@grafedia.net” to get the content behind the link.

h3. “The Blue Plaque project”:http://www.blueplaqueproject.org

Collect all of the plaques in London, and then to put the people and events they commemorate in context – with their time, their contemporaries, and location.

h3. “Implementation”:http://nickm.com/implementation/

Implementation begins as sheets of stickers, with a different text on each sticker. We will distribute these sheets to individuals, both personally and via post. Instructions, asking people to peel the stickers off and place them in an area viewable by the public, will accompany the sheets.

h3. “Talking street”:http://www.talkingstreet.com/

Using everyday technologies, like your own cell phone, Talking Street offers new ways to explore a destination. It’s having an ultra-savvy resident show you around — a guide who can reveal what a place is really like, and how it got that way.

h3. “The intelligent street”:http://www.informal.org/street/

The intelligent street will enhance the experience of users in both locations by creating a gentle sonic playground that reflects the cultures of its users, entertain and act as a talking point. Users will be able to interract by sending SMS messages from their mobile phone. A display in each location and on the web will give optional information about how users are engaging.

h3. “Neighbornode”:http://www.neighbornode.net/

Group message boards on wireless nodes, placed in residential areas and open to the public. These nodes transmit signal for around 300 feet, so everyone within that range has access to the board and can read and post to it.

h3. “TAG: Scripting Presence”:http://a.parsons.edu/~awhung/thesis/site/concept.htm

The inundation of consumer and mass media advertisements has eroded the presence of the individual within the city. In my thesis, I will explore how we can reclaim our physical landscape by reinserting the individual through visual representation into her/his urban environment. My intent is to create a momentary place to communicate messages of self-expression contributing to a network in which the next user can connect and experience.

h3. “R-Click”:http://www.nttdocomo.com/presscenter/pressreleases/press/pressrelease.html?param%5Bno%5D=379

An area-information service from NTT DoCoMo incorporating mobile phones and a “wireless tag” device. A small, handheld RFID device will enable users to receive a wide variety of area information as they walk around the new metropolitan cultural complex of shops, restaurants, entertainment facilities, residences and hotels (Roppongi Hills).

h3. “Public Play Spaces”:http://civ.idc.cs.chalmers.se/projects/pps/

A platform for creative work exploring the playful, emotional and appropriate incorporation of technology into everyday public life. Drawing on our combined background in art, architecture, game and interaction design, the work focuses on developing both innovative design methods and experimental prototypes for social interventions in public space.

h3. “Trailblazer”:http://www.interaction-ivrea.it/theses/2002-03/f.li/

A computer-mediated communication tool for supporting a virtual community. It attempts to integrate aspects of physical activity by community members in the real world into the virtual environment and to provide a structure for discourse around those activities.

h3. “34 North 118 West”:http://34n118w.net/

Lets the user uncover samples of Los Angeles’s hidden history as s/he navigates through the multi-layered depths of downtown’s most poetic and surreal space. The result is a new kind of ‘scripted space’…

h3. “InterUrban”:http://interurban.34n118w.net/

A user-driven experience that responds to participant’s amble through the city streets. Factors such as the distance traveled by the listener, time of day and proximity to fictive events, determine how the narrative unfolds.

h3. “Hidden natures”:http://www.heretico.net/pretext.html

Location based narrative. Texts read by actors are the voices of the characters you hear as you walk through a space. A double headed arrow on the screen of your pocket computer (PDA) indicates the narrative direction – the future in one direction and the past another

h3. “Greyworld: Telescapes”:http://www.creativetime.org/consumingplaces/art_greyworld.html

Visitors discover a soundscape of messages left for them by both the artists and the public via voice and email. This interactive installation calls attention to how advances in cellular and wireless technologies contribute to the ubiquity of personal communications in public spaces, while illuminating the relationship between the built environment and the invisible networks that make these fleeting exchanges possible.

h3. “Geoloqus”:http://www.geoloq.us/blog/

Geoloq.us is a service that lets users leave behind memories, comments and digital artefacts in a physical location, for others to discover and enjoy. A cameraphone with a web browser is all you need to use geoloq.us; browse pictures from the place you?re at, comment a location or a picture and find out what?s nearby. Tag your items and surf those tags for similar items from other people in other places.

h3. “GeoNotes”:http://www.sics.se/research/article.php?newsid=105

Based on positioning technology, allows people to attach virtual notes to real world locations. When other people pass the location, they will be notified about the note and will be able to read it. GeoNotes allows mass-annotations with no or little restrictions on accessing others’ GeoNotes. It is also social in the way it incorporates social filtering techniques to sort out unwanted GeoNotes.

h3. “GeoStickies”:http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/noriyuki/artworks/geostickies/index.html

An interactive public art project that enables us to make and access to collective of personal memory that could have been overlaid on to urban space. The project puts some “tags” of small events onto geographical fields so that the audience can feel correspondence between “Information space” and “Urban space”. The audience will find tiny electronic memorials for tiny events. But those are only visible or able to be experienced through mobile phones.

h3. “GeoGraffiti”:http://www.gpster.net/geograffiti.html

To demonstrate the concept of waypoint sharing we have been developing a number of waypoint sharing applications. These applications access the waypoint lists for retrieval and storage of waypoint data and other accessory information, such as text, images, audio, video, or links to other information.

h3. “Digital Graffiti (Siemens)”:http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,119598,00.asp

The application allows mobile phone owners to send a message, similar to an SMS (Short Message Service), to a geographical point where it appears on the screens of other users passing through the defined location. Unlike an SMS, the message is not sent to a person but rather to a location, and can be received by a number of mobile phone users entering the defined radius.

h3. “Ambient Wood”:http://machen.mrl.nott.ac.uk/Projects/Digitalplay/Ambientwood-I.htm

An outdoor playful learning experience. Pervasive technologies are used to digitally augment a woodland in a contextually relevant way, enhancing the ?usual? physical experience available to children exploring the outdoor world. Studies show this to be a highly engaging novel experience for learners, that effectively supports collaborative learning, as well as providing preliminary guidelines for designing different ways of delivering digital information for learning.

h3. “Thingster”:http://thingster.org/

Lets you publish information about places. You can use thingster to discover things in your own neighborhood that might be interesting to you – and you can use thingster to publish information about things that you find interesting. Thingster also provides signalling and discovery services for discovering other nearby folks with interests similar to your own.

h3. “World-Wide Media eXchange”:http://wwmx.org/

The project explores possibilities with digital photographs and geographic location. The location where a photo was taken provides clues about its semantic context and offers an intuitive way to index it, even in a very large collection. The combination is powerful, but still not supported well by either the photo-software or camera-hardware industries.

h3. “Mobile Media Metadata”:http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/abstracts/03-04/040402-davis.html

Leverages the spatio-temporal context and social community of media capture to infer media content.

h3. “Altavistas”:http://proboscis.org.uk/prps/docs/p_hooker_kitchen.html

An experimental project to explore how physical and electronic spaces can be designed in conjunction with each other to provide new kinds of experience in the city.

h3. “mStory”:http://www.techkwondo.com/projects/mstory.htm

A mobile mapping and recording system built for the PocketPC platform. It integrates GPS tracking technology with a set of diary-like recording features. mStory assign a variety of attributes to recorded locations, including photos, audio recordings, narrative descriptions and icons.

h3. “Katumuisti tositarinoita Helsingista [Street memories]”:http://www.katumuisti.net/

Personal local stories for public listening using mobile phones & billboard notices.

h3. “Interactive portrait of the Liberties”:http://www.mle.ie/~vnisi/liberties/indexLib.html

An interactive digital narrative application providing multimedia content to individuals and to groups, which is relevant to them at a particular point in time and space.

h3. “Section”:http://www.section.ws/

A database video project, currently under development, that examines the embedded syntax of our routes through the city and challenges the mediated experiences of the urban environment through methods of collecting, editing and compositing video.

h3. “TRACE”:http://www.research.umbc.edu/%7Erueb/trace/paper.html

A memorial environmental sound installation that is site-specific to the network of hiking trails near the Burgess Shale fossil beds in Yoho National Park, British Columbia.

h3. “Map Hub”:http://www.maphub.org/

MapHub is a web-based, multi-user, group managed information storage system and map. Collecting information about people, places, events, and notes, can help to document unseen narratives and histories in public or private theme-based Hubs.

h3. “Community Mapbuilder”:http://mapbuilder.sourceforge.net/

Offers a range of resources to help organizations get started with standards-based online mapping. The main initial focus is creating an open source framework to allow communities to jointly build geographic databases and share them over the web.

h3. “Annotated multimedia Google map”:http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000917034960/

This how-to will show you how to make your own annotated Google map from your own GPS data. Plus, you?ll be able to tie in images and video to create an interactive multimedia map.

h3. “City of memory”:http://www.localprojects.net/cofm/cofm.shtml

A narrative map of New York City that allows visitors to create a collective memory by submitting stories. Visitors link stories together by theme, creating new “neighborhoods” of narrative that can be explored by others. Stories can be recommended, giving new visitors a sense of the narrative created by the populace.

h3. “TeleTaxi”:http://www.year01.com/teletaxi/

A site-specific media art exhibition in a taxicab. The taxi is outfitted with an interactive touch screen that displays video, animations, music, and information triggered by an onboard GPS(Global Positioning System) receiver which allows the displayed artwork to change depending on where the taxi is in the city.

h3. “New York Songlines”:http://home.nyc.rr.com/jkn/nysonglines/

By relying on maps, signs and Manhattan’s perpendicular geography, New Yorkers have given up something important: a sense of place. If you can get from your starting place to your destination without knowing anything about the points in between, chances are you won’t pay much attention to them.

h3. “Touch Tone Tours”:http://www.touchtonetours.com

Delivers tour guides of popular landmarks, museums, attractions and the unusual to wireless devices. “More info”:http://ctlss.com.

h3. “Soundwalk”:http://www.soundwalk.com/

Sound recordings as guides to specific locations. Available as audio for sale or as downloaded format from Audible or iTunes.

h3. “Tag”:http://a.parsons.edu/~awhung/thesis/

A street activity proposed for the site of Times Square, NYC. Employing mobile phone text messaging, it focuses on increasing personal contribution and interaction to the experience of this public space. Individuals will participate with one another as they tag designated areas or ?nodes?? by displaying their inscription.

h3. “Mogi”:http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=100501

A collecting game ‘item hunt’. The game provides a data-layer over the city of Tokyo. As you move through the city, if you check a map on your mobile phone screen, you’ll see nearby items you can pick up and nearby players you can meet or trade with.

h3. “ASAP: another spatial annotation project”:http://www.techkwondo.com/projects/a_s_a_p/index.html

Allows you to visualize your location on a map, use a GPS unit (I use a GPS-based GPS device) to mark your coordinates (or just navigate the map to find your location – especially useful in cavernous cities like Manhattan), annotate that location by titling it and giving it a description, optionally adding an icon or snapping a digital picture with the attached camera.

h3. “Urban Tapestries”:http://urbantapestries.net/

A research project exploring social and cultural uses of the convergence of place and mobile technologies.

h3. “HyConExplorer”:http://www.daimi.au.dk/~fah/hycon/html/

HyCon is a framework and infrastructure for context aware hypermedia systems developed primarily by the hypermedia group at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. The HyCon framework encompasses annotations, links, and guided tours associating locations and RFID- or Bluetooth-tagged objects with maps, Web pages, and collections of resources. The HyCon architecture extends upon earlier location based hypermedia systems by supporting authoring in the field and by providing access to browsing and searching information through a novel geo-based search (GBS) interface for the Web.

h3. “Herecast”:http://www.herecast.com/

Provides location-based services on a WiFi device. At its simplest level, it can tell you where you are. More advanced services can use your location to enhance information lookups, publish presence information and create games.

h3. “Texting Glances”:http://www.mee.tcd.ie/~ledoyle/textingglances.htm

This ambient “waiting” game establishes a symbiotic relationship between a transient audience, a waiting place, and a story engine that matches SMS inputs to image output. By incorporating culturally current messaging norms, the audience becomes an active collaborating author in a layered exploration of social familiarity and public space.

h3. “Public alley 818”:http://www.ikatun.com/k/publicalley818/

Creating and performing artworks in a public alley in Boston, MA, with work selected by participants in the space and online.

h3. “One block radius”:http://www.oneblockradius.org/

Psychogeographic survey of one block in New York, building a multi-layered portrait of a particular part of the city.

h3. “Annotate space”:http://www.annotatespace.com

A project to develop experiential forms of journalism and nonfiction storytelling for use at specific locations. Stories are presented through text, images and audio files that participants can download from the Web to their handheld computers and take with them to the place of interest.

h3. “Annotated Earth”:http://www.annotatedearth.com/

The goal of AnnotatedEarth is to create a user-driven community of quality location and spatial information, a infrastructure for accessing that information, and software that uses that information to provide location-aware information.

h3. “Embedded Theatre”:http://www.interaction-ivrea.it/theses/2002-03/r.genz/

A system for creating immersive narrative experiences where location is an actor. It is the result of an intensive research and design project addressing how interactive narrative can be successfully realized through mobile technology.

h3. “Tag and Scan”:http://www.tagandscan.com/

London-based locational application and service for mobile telephones. The technology allows users to “tag” a physical locations, placing them into meaningful context. Tags can be private or public. Other TagandScan users can scan their environment for public tags left by others. TagandScan essentially enables the community to annotate its physical features.

h3. “Spotcode”:http://www.highenergymagic.com/spotcode/index.html

Each Spot is a circular symbol that holds data like a two dimensional bar code. Users of the latest camera phones point their phone at the Bango Spot circular symbol, click and the mobile site opens on their phone in a matter of seconds.

h3. “PDPal”:http://pdpal.walkerart.org/

A mapping application that transforms everyday activities and urban experiences into a dynamic city that you write. Engages the user through a visual transformation that is meant to highlight the way technologies that locate and orient are often static and without reference to the lively nature of urban cultural environments.

h3. “AmbieSense”:http://www.ambiesense.com/

Context-sensitive technology based on the use of context tags. These small electronic tags are a means of capturing and communicating information about the surroundings.

h3. “Hypertag”:http://www.hypertag.com

A commercial service allowing access to info and content on a mobile phone directly from objects like adverts and signs. It works by allowing infra-red mobile phones, and PDAs (e.g. Palm Pilots or Pocket PCs) to interact with a small electronic tag which is attached to the advert or sign.

h3. “Pathalog”:http://www.patholog.org/

Exploring the ability of a path-based publishing system, based upon GPS tracking technologies, to foster new relationships between communities of users and their environments.

h3. “Waveblog”:http://www.waveblog.com/ / “Wavemarket”:http://www.wavemarket.com/

Three commercial platforms for location based services. You can add information and commentary about restaurant reviews to safety tips. Waveblog lets users upload blog-like information with geographic metadata.

h3. “Rabble”:http://www.rabble.com/

Rabble enables a new kind of self-expression that informs, entertains and connects people through the media they create. Create your channel and post location-based media – your favorite places, photos or an up-to-the-minute newsworthy event. It’s like putting virtual sticky notes on the world around you.

h3. “Earthcomber”:http://www.earthcomber.com/

Lets you connect with customers in a timely, efficient and positive way. By providing a direct match between a user’s favorite and something you offer, Earthcomber brings you to the customer’s attention. In multiple information screens, they can see what you offer and where you are on the map.

h3. “Timespots”:http://www.timespots.com/

Offers ‘location-based services’ on mobile devices (PocketPC/phones) enabling new uses of traditional travel and tourism services. We overcome current limitations (in reach of and access to information and services) by combining information and navigation services with communication services on one device.

h3. “Websigns”:http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2001/jul-sept/websign.html

HP research labs. Using a handheld computer, cellular phone or other device, users can get information on the Web related to physical structures and objects in the immediate vicinity.

h3. “Microsoft Aura”:http://aura.research.microsoft.com/

The Advanced User Resource Annotation system (A.U.R.A.) is designed to provide the ability to access and author annotations on objects and places using machine readable tags. In our system, a user can associate text, threaded conversations, audio, images, video or other data with specific tags. Users can also review the tags and descriptions of the objects they have encountered and annotated in a custom web portal.

h3. “Active Campus”:http://www.calit2.net/briefingPapers/activeCampus.html

Community-oriented ubiquitous computing, exploring the problem and opportunity of sustaining community through mobile wireless technology. The two principal applications in operation are: ActiveCampus Explorer, which uses students’ locations to help engage them in campus life; and ActiveClass, a client-server application for enhancing participation in the classroom setting via small mobile wireless devices.

h3. “Mobile Augmented Reality Systems”:http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/projects/mars/

Exploring the synergy of two promising fields of user interface research: Augmented reality, in which 3D displays are used to overlay a synthesized world on top of the real world, and mobile computing, in which increasingly small and inexpensive computing devices, linked by wireless networks, allow us to to use computing facilities while roaming the real world.

h3. “Living Memory LiMe”:http://www.memoire-vivante.org/

A network of augmented places within the local community which support the creation and meaningful distribution of informal content within that community. LiMe provides low-threshold interfaces in natural meeting and crossing points within that community, such as caf?s and bus stops.

h3. “Location linked information”:http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~mankins/lli/

LLI is similar to augmented reality systems which overlay digital information on top of the physical world. Whereas augmented reality systems typically concentrate on solving the user interface problem, LLI attempts to solve the data access and search infrastructure issues. In LLI users navigate the physical world with a variety of XML-speaking devices, discovering and leaving “handles” to information nuggets.

h3. “MUD London”:http://space.frot.org/mudlondon.html

A kind of collaborative mapping project. it consists of geographical models which are represented as RDF graphs. you can wander round them, like a MUD or MOO, with a bot interface which you can use to create and connect new places.

h3. “Psychogeographical Markup Language”:http://socialfiction.org/psychogeography/PML.html

A protocol that can be used to capture meaningful psychogeographical [meta]data about urban space. PML is a unified system of classification that lurks behind the psychogeogram: the diagrammatic representation of psychogeographically experienced space.

h3. “Spatial Annotation with Locative Packets”:http://locative.rixc.lv/workshop/index.cgi?Locative_Packets

An attempt to fuse powerful concepts of existential declaration (I am here experiencing this!) with networked social communication media. By mixing together a set of terms about space, time, description, social relationship, and media, the locative packet project has described a unique ether over which one form of collaborative map can travel.

h3. “Wooster Collective”:http://www.woostercollective.com/

Huge archive of street artists work, techniques, interviews, and guides.

p(context). Here I am only including projects that mark space, not mobile social software or dynamic gaming, smart-mobs, friend-finders or GPS drawing projects, although I have included a couple of spatial platforms, that aim to standardise the way we mark-up space.

Transcultural mapping workshops

Update: “new website”:http://www.futurefarmers.com/survey/outskirts.html

Public markup

I have made a selection of research images over at Flickr, and more of the text and research will be online soon.

Urban GPS experience

It’s possible to use the “GPS Map 60c”:http://www.garmin.com/products/gpsmap60c/ in an old “Marimekko bag”:http://www.marimekko.fi in a mobile phone pocket just small enough that the aerial sticks out. In this way it can be placed in windows of buses or cars without it sliding around, and I can walk around without looking like a geek or getting mugged.

!/images/urbangps03.gif(Rendered trail of three months walking in Oslo)!

h3. Problems

In short, GPS doesn’t work well in dense urban environments like most European cities. This is from the perspective of a pedestrian confined to the pavements (sidewalks) and public transport. From a few experiences whilst being driven around, it seems to work well in a car, probably because of the clear sky area available in the middle of the road. Inclement weather and green trees also seem to be problematic.

In these last few months, attempting to record a good quality database of tracks to geo-locate my photographs, I must have looked really odd. Face in device, stopping on street corners, stopping in the middle of street crossings and scrambling to grab the front seat of the bus. Discovering that GPS doesn’t just passively work is a great disappointment and my dataset is clouded with gaps and anomalies.

h3. Some other observations

* Fast turns when using public transport or car result in wild deviations: re-aquiring satellites is the problem
* Need a road that aligns with at least 4 satellites to get an acceptable track, anything else and the errors can accumulate
* Glass buildings can result in ‘reflections’ of position, eg jumping to other locations due to reflected signals
* I sit on the outside or front of buses: to get a wider expanse of sky area: I am constantly aware of sky cover
* The relative position of satellites is beginning to have an effect on the side of the street that I walk on
* Walking in the middle of the street: had a couple of near misses with cars – the moving map is just too engaging
* I would like an explanation of the lost track calculations: this device seems to use the last-known bearing and velocity to guess new tracks when the signal fails. This is very unreliable and problematic as it fills the map with phantom trails
* The track can be more useful over time than the (base) map: it shows my personal space and personal routes, I know where I have been and can use it to retrace routes or places. Popular routes build up in blackness and thickness. Home area becomes an abstract scatter plot of routes, but it’s very familiar
* Stored waypoints are really useful for getting large, general bearings on location: zooming out and seeing a relationship to two known landmarks can be really useful in an unknown area

!/images/urbangps04.gif(Rendered trail of two weeks walking and public transport in London)!

!/images/urbangps01.jpg(GPS receiver resting on the top deck of the number 4 bus, London)!

!/images/urbangps02.jpg(GPS receiver in the window of a train, Oslo)!

Travelogue